John Millei´s ‘Women in a Chair’ Serie
John Millei (b. 1958, Los Angeles) is an Associate Professor at the art faculty in Pasadena, at Claremont Graduate University, and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He is one of the recognised representatives of Californian abstraction that emerged in the 1980s and has participated in numerous museum exhibitions alongside leading artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Ernst Wilhelm Nay. His works are held in international collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), LACMA (Los Angeles), and the Museo Jumex (Mexico City).
Millei began painting in the late 1970s as a former assistant to Richard Diebenkorn. He was influenced by Jasper Johns’ iconic 0 through 9 series (1960) and by the abstract-expressionist paintings of John Altoon—a prominent figure in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and 1960s.
John Millei belongs to a generation of artists such as Lari Pittman, Roger Herman, and later Mary Weatherford, Mark Bradford, and Laura Owens, who were instrumental in shifting painting in Los Angeles away from the minimalism of the Light and Space movement and toward a more painterly, open approach—one that operates in the tension between figuration and representation, pop culture, and Abstract Expressionism.
In the 1990s, John Millei began exhibiting with the influential Ace Gallery in Los Angeles. Founded in Vancouver and opened in Los Angeles in 1967, Ace Gallery became an important institution, presenting artists including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Robert Motherwell.
Millei is an artist whose visual vocabulary knows no boundaries. He plays with images and themes that have long functioned as motifs within the canon of art history—the seascape, the flower, Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar, Cézanne’s bathers, and many more.
These motifs and genres, however, serve only as a point of departure for his imagination. What truly interests him is how he can playfully reinvent and subvert these icons through his keen sense of the absurd and his command of colour and scale.
In the “Woman in a Chair” series, for example, Millei re-stages Picasso’s famous “Portrait de Dora Maar” (1938). Yet the paintings in this series are concerned neither with Picasso himself nor with Dora Maar as a subject; rather, they serve as a starting point for Millei’s exploration of his own stylistic development. Through this engagement with a guiding motif of 20th-century art history, he gives free rein to the elasticity of his painterly skill, stretching the original structure of Picasso’s composition with every artistic means imaginable—colour, form, minimalism, abstraction.
“Millei’s relationship with the past is symbiotic rather than parasitic: he gives it the only authentic life it can have in the present. Turning known artistic territory into a terra incognita of abstraction, he restores art’s existential mystery.”
(Donald Kuspit)