Garry Fabian Miller. Time Passage

20 November 2008 - 24 January 2009

Garry Fabian Miller is one of the most powerful and respected artists working in photography today. Since 1985 Fabian Miller has worked exclusively within the darkroom, producing camera-less images, each a unique product of an event, for which there is no negative. His images are created by a long process of exposing light directly onto photographic paper through organic materials and substances such as plants, oil and water.

The exhibition: Garry Fabian Miller. Time Passage presents for the first time since the 1970s, vintage prints of Fabian Miller's famous Sea Horizon series, including photographs never previously exhibited or reproduced. Also included are plant studies, such as the multi-part work Honesty, made in 1985 when the artist gave up using a camera in favour of working experimentally in his darkroom.

The exhibition also presents major pictures from some of the artist's most acclaimed series including Petworth WindowsThoughts of a Night Sea, and Exposure. The show ends with a first opportunity to see ambitious new pictures, such as Ascending, made in the last few months.
Miller's pictures draw from the early darkroom experiments of photographic pioneers such as Fox Talbot but also have a particular contemporary resonance. On the one hand, Fabian Miller's latest imagery parallels the Modernism of international figures ranging from Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko to Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly and James Turrell, and on the other it possesses an essential Englishness which can be traced back to Turner, as well as to post-war abstract painters such as Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson. The work is deeply formal, yet also profoundly spiritual, contemplative yet uplifting.

Fabian Miller has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Japan. Museum collections include the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. A monograph on the artist, Illumine, was published by Merrell in 2005. 
Fabian Miller Time Passage explores, for the first time, the importance of notions of time to the artist's work and is accompanied by a major new publication that explores this theme.