Harland Miller is back in London, bringing monumental, brash, and unapologetically graphic works. These new pieces, alongside pieces from his ongoing Letter Painting series, take over two locations in the Design Museum this December.
Miller is both an artist and a writer, and that duality is evident in every canvas. He has a knack for transforming letters into landscapes and words into architecture. In the Helene and Johannes Huth Gallery, his giant canvases dazzle in bright, saturated colours, each letter a character in its own right. On the mezzanine, works on paper offer a more intimate view — the kind of close inspection that reveals the meticulous structural thinking behind the massive paintings below, inviting the audience to appreciate the depth and complexity of his work. Graphic design is Miller’s language, and he’s fluent. He invents his own typefaces, manipulates colour, stretches scale — all to make letters feel alive.
Harland Miller said: “I think due to some attitude, or the culture that was around when I was growing up, I would think of design, and particularly graphic design, as something to subvert. Strangely — or perhaps it’s entirely natural — this approach led me to an understanding and appreciation of design I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Understanding and appreciation are two things the Design Museum is all about, so it’s fantastic in a full-circle kind of way to be showing these paintings there from next month.”
Some of the exhibition’s highlights have already made headlines: Far Out (2022), Miller’s first diptych, where letters fight for attention across two canvases; XXX (2025), a meditation on a single letter that nods to punk, X-rated cinema, and Miller’s own visual obsessions. Scale matters here. The Huth Gallery canvases echo Miller’s time in Los Angeles, cruising past giant billboards, soaking in their audacity. Then there’s the contrast of the more minor works — drawings and studies — that expose the painstaking hand behind the spectacle. You can trace the lineage from medieval manuscripts to contemporary Pop Art, from monks hunched over illuminated letters to Miller hunched over a canvas in his studio.
Miller co-curates with Tim Marlow, Director and CEO of the Design Museum. His work — polychromatic, graphically vernacular, infused with irreverent northern English humour — draws from literature, music, self-help guides, and medieval iconography. Words, he says, are irresistible: “People read before they can stop themselves…there is this imbalance in terms of how much the words are doing as words.” That tension — between text and image, sacred and everyday, high and low culture — is the engine of the show.
The Design Museum, in its landmark Kensington home, is the ideal stage. It’s not just a gallery; it’s a crossroads of public, industry, and education. Miller’s letters may be contemporary, but the conversation he sparks is timeless, engaging the audience and connecting them to the broader narrative of design. Design can move, provoke, and even delight. And Miller? He makes it impossible to look away.
Harland Miller (b. 1964, England)
Harland Miller’s work is a unique blend of literature, Pop Art, and something darker — a wry northern humour that creeps in unexpectedly. His paintings, polychromatic and graphic, occupy a space that is both familiar and intriguing. He’s as much a writer as a painter, and the two halves of his practice feed off each other. Words are never decorative; they’re structural, playful, sometimes confrontational.
Miller is best known for his Letter Painting series — giant canvases where letters dominate the surface, wrestling for attention, each one perfectly imperfect. He designs his own typefaces, employs saturated colours, and scales letters to monumental proportions. But don’t think it’s all show: more minor works on paper reveal the method beneath the madness. Medieval manuscripts, with their painstakingly illuminated letters, inspired him from an early age. He saw the devotion, the labour, the obsession — and translated it into contemporary canvases that flirt with Pop Art’s immediacy.
His references are wide-ranging. Literature, self-help manuals, music, X-rated cinema, Punk, high art, low culture — Miller blends it all up and applies it back onto the canvas, somehow making it coherent and elegant. Yet there’s an edge, a sense that the viewer is being pulled into a conversation about the power of words and images, about scale, narrative, and mischief.
Miller’s work has a devoted international following, and he has exhibited widely in Europe and the US. But at the core, he remains an artist fascinated by language itself — how words function, mislead, charm, or confront. “People read before they can stop themselves,” he says. That restless energy, that tension, is Miller’s signature.
Harland Miller at the Design Museum 10 December 2025 – 25 January 2026 The Design Museum, London