Rubicon Gallery
19 Jan 08 - 15 Feb 08




In 1997 Nick Miller began working from the back of a mobile studio – a converted truck; painting powerful portraits of the land around his home in Co Sligo. This mobile studio makes possible a unique and direct engagement with ‘Landscape’ as a subject in the same way he might face a person in the studio. This show at Rubicon Gallery runs in parallel with a major exhibition of a decade’s drawings from the mobile studio at Limerick City Gallery. In Dublin he presents the new drawings made since his recent move to a new studio and area of Co Sligo at the foot of Ben Bulben.

Nick Miller is an artist who moves with dexterity and conviction between Portraiture, Still Life, Landscape and The Figure - working within the traditions of painting he manages to revitalize and re-invent those traditions into something contemporary yet timeless. His work is always charged by his continual engagement with ‘real presence’.

In this unique ‘mobile studio’ the artist opens to truck doors to nature in a full frontal assault. It has allowed a merging of an enclosed ‘culture of the studio’ with the thrill and immediacy of ‘Plein Air’ painting. Since the beginning of his unusual “Truckscape” project, Miller has worked on large-scale black ink drawings made on heavy-duty paper that is scored and redrawn both with brush and power tools. The result is a series of intense, highly worked, mostly black and white images that are a homage, both to the landscape and to the vehicular studio from which they are drawn and seen.
This exhibition runs in parallel with a major show at Limerick City Gallery of Art (January 17-February 24).

Truckscapes: Drawings from a mobile studio 1998-2007 was first shown shown at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. To coincide with the exhibition the Rubicon Gallery has published a beautiful book documenting the project, and including an insightful essay by Peter Plagens, a New York based critic, artist and contributing editor at Newsweek and Artforum.

Born in London in 1962, Nick Miller moved to Ireland in 1984 and now lives in Co. Sligo. He has exhibited in Ireland, Britain, the US and Netherlands, including solo shows at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. His works are included in major public and private collections in Ireland, Europe and Asia. He is a member of Aosdána.

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Rubicon Gallery
10 St. Stephens Green
Dublin 2, Ireland
Ireland
TEL : +353 1 670 8055
info@rubicongallery.ie
www.rubicongallery.ie/