Harland Miller at the Design Museum

Co-curated by Harland Miller and the Design Museum’s Director and CEO Tim Marlow, this free display explores how Miller harnesses the principles of graphic design, deploying bright, saturated colour palettes and a wide range of typefaces designed by the artist himself.

Presented across two locations within the museum, the display features large-scale paintings in the Helene and Johannes Huth Gallery (Level 2), while works on paper from the same series are on show on the Garfield Weston Mezzanine (Atrium).

The canvases displayed at Huth Gallery reflect Miller's time living in Los Angeles, driving past monolithic billboards on the highway. In the Mezzanine, a selection of works on paper from the same series offer an insight into the structural composition that informs Miller’s large-scale paintings. The Letter Paintings series demonstrates the relationship between art and design in Miller's work, which makes the Design Museum a fitting location for a series based on the language of graphic design.

Highlights include Far Out (2022), Miller's first diptych in the series, where huge letters rendered in rich, saturated colours vie for attention across the two canvases, and XXX (2025), which repeats a letter which is significant to the artist in its form and design, but also due to its connotations and connections to punk culture and X-rated cinema.

Miller is recognised as one of the leading figures in international contemporary art. It was while studying for an A-Level in the History of Lettering that Miller discovered the allure of medieval manuscripts, in which monks laboured to produce highly decorative letters as chapter-headings. This painstaking process was the source of inspiration for the Letter Painting series and the related works on paper, and a subject that Miller returns to time and again, synthesising modern Pop Art sensibility with centuries-old manuscript illumination, melding the sacred with the everyday.

Background image: Oh No, 2024 © Harland Miller. Photo © White Cube (David Westwood). Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Oil on canvas