Executed on large-scale canvases, Harland Miller mimics the worn appearance of vintage Penguin Classics book covers, adding his own fictitious and satirical titles. Inspired by Pop Art and imbued with social critique, the Penguin Classics prints are loaded with dark humour.
Join Our Network of Collectors. Buy, Sell and Track Demand
Quintessential to Harland Miller's oeuvre, the Penguin Classics prints reimagine iconic vintage book covers. Miller’s prints and paintings based on dust jackets came from his stumbling upon a box of Penguin Books outside a second-hand English bookstore in Paris in 1992. Infusing Miller's interests in the written word and visual arts, these works feature tongue-in-cheek titles penned by the artist himself. From optimistic titles like High On Hope to the totally macabre Heroin, It's What Your Right Arm's For, all of Miller's Penguin Classics encourage the viewer's sense of humour.
First seen at an ICA Group show in 1996, Miller’s Penguin Classics were what propelled him to art-world acclaim. The founder of White Cube, Jay Jopling, who visited the exhibition, saw great potential in the Penguin works and arranged a studio visit with Miller. He has been represented by White Cube ever since and is now amongst the gallery’s most sought-after artists.
The Penguin Classics have become a career-spanning fascination for Miller, and he has created countless iterations of the vintage dust jackets in different colour-ways. At times, Miller's titles sometimes seem auto-biographical, like his International Lonely Guy and Too Cool To Lose. In other instances, the avid reader will notice references to famous authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway. Wry and controversial, many of the Penguin Classics titles are positively outrageous, like Incurable Romantic Seeks Filthy Dirty Whore and Health And Safety Is Killing Bondage.
Modelled after the instantly recognisable Penguin Classics covers, these prints toy with our visual memory. Just like Andy Warhol's Pop Art, Miller's Penguin works treat the recognisable book cover like a still life, and challenge the viewer to interrogate their meaning. As an author himself, Miller is keen to emphasise the power of the written word - an no collection proves that better than his Penguin Classics. As the artist said himself, ”I realised that the design of those classics would throw all the focus on to the title of the book, which is exactly what I wanted to do.(…) People are so used to the format already with the text in the middle that you could really say whatever you wanted.”