Lewis Miller ‘A Doll’s Room’

Lewis Miller’s A Doll’s Room comprises a group of oil paintings and a series of painted and framed glass panes displayed on plinths. The title points to Miller’s interest in the simulation of reality played out within doll’s houses and still life painting. Both are models of domestic and interior life – containers for ideals that blur the boundary between reality and fiction. Pictures within pictures or plays within plays, they echo the material reality of their own surroundings as well as societal conventions and aspirations more broadly. Throughout the exhibition, the act of painting draws the life-sized and the minute together on canvas, pushing the real into a fictive realm, and allowing miniaturised spaces to be articulated more concretely at scale.

Miller’s concern with the everyday and mise en scène is manifested in the quietude of his composed interiors; they are emptied of figures yet invoke their presence, allowing the viewer to focus on the objects which occupy his rooms – their strange and evocative surfaces. In the absence of actors, fabrics come to play a central role: the heavy folds of a velvet curtain, an iridescent flash of coat lining, the twisted tissue of bed linen. In Double Figure Night, 2025, and Fabric, 2025, dark cyan and chartreuse grids give way to bright triangular creases and folds. In each, the contours of the depicted surface converge with the light they appear to reflect, bringing about an oblique hybrid image.

The play of scale continues in Miller’s glass works which again evoke the close quarters of the doll’s house. Across their panes, interior and domestic fragments coalesce or otherwise collide with abstract patterns, drips and fields of colour. Light passes through them via open ended apertures, rendering the layers partially visible, partially obscured. Each one distorts and effects the next and the collective image shifts in response to the viewer’s orientation and the lighting of the surrounding environment. While these assemblages embody a more spontaneous approach to painting than the works on canvas, they share a concern with imaginary space – its potential to shift one’s perception of reality.