A person with short hair and tattoos on their arms leaning over a table, working on a painting with various shades of red, pink, and purple. Behind them are three large, partially completed paintings.

Kika Sroka-Miller is an artist, publisher and literary agent living and working in London.

BIOGRAPHY

Kika Sroka-Miller’s paintings were first shown in October 2022 as part of the We are what we see exhibition alongside artists Michaela Stark, Floria Sigismondi and Sandro Kopp, curated by Glimpses Agency, London. Since then their work has been shortlisted for the Waverton Art Prize, included in Art on a Postcard’s Tenth Anniversary Auction, selected for the Assembly House Trust Biennial and been shown in multiple group shows internationally.

Sroka-Miller makes colourful oil paintings at various scales. Their work grapples with themes of disorder, irregularity, chaos and categorisation. They are fascinated by how our eyes can sense consistent colour and form within the quantum soup of the universe, whilst our minds home in on opposites, binaries and dualisms to make sense of our surroundings and ourselves.

Crucially they are absorbed by the (very human) impulse to legibility, by our need to make sense. In a way, their painting practice is an infinite experiment in meaning making. They believe painting can reach beyond language, the body and subjectivity, into other material and metaphysical realms.

In addition to their studio practice, Sroka-Miller is Founder of Blue Parlour, an artist-run creative network and curatorial project sharing the work of artists exploring sexuality through their practice. They are also Director of Awaiting Press which represents the literary estate of Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army and formerly the FBI’s most wanted woman.

Sroka-Miller was Editorial and then Managing Director of the publishing house Zed Books (2011-2022), which sold to Bloomsbury in 2020. Zed housed the works of many notable writers including Eleanor Roosevelt, Nawal El Saadawi, Assata Shakur, Maggie Nelson, Vandana Shiva and Yanis Varoufakis, among others.

Sroka-Miller studied Art Foundation at Chelsea College of Art, BA Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Art and holds a Master’s in Gender and Sexuality, with an emphasis on philosophy, psychoanalysis and film theory, from Birkbeck College where their tutors included Laura Mulvey. They are an alumni of Turps Painting School, 2023-2026.

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“It’s the bit before meaning making that fascinates me. the threshold between sensation, recognition AND UNDERSTANDING. FOR ME PAINTING EXISTS IN THAT THRESHOLD; The place we inhabit before the impulse to make sense takes over. Before the need to read or to make legible. The search for legibility makes a policeman of us ALL.”