Alma Allen, Not Yet Titled, 2022

Psychologically charged and compulsively expressive, Alma Allen’s works evoke a curiosity regarding the life of objects and the ways in which form and material can circumnavigate the utility of language. Known for his distillation of diverse organic references, the artist’s works simultaneously invite and resist classification.

Often realized in stone, wood, or bronze—materials hand-selected from quarries or foraged from landscapes in the area surrounding his studio—the works emit a mysterious and ineffable lifeforce. These abstracted, biomorphic shapes feel talismanic not only in their atmospheric qualities but also by way of their playfulness: bronze sculptures appear impossibly malleable, even liquid; wood and stone grain patterns are accented to highlight their material history. Whichever medium Allen chooses, the works’ final forms and their particular outcrops and eccentricities seem as though they have been conjured by the artist during their making, born of a wordless conversation between sculptor and object.

The artist’s hybrid process encompasses preindustrial methods of hand-shaping and carving alongside advanced 21st-century technology. After repeatedly reworking finger-scale clay maquettes, Allen will employ, as needed, a self-built robotic device for translation into large-scale works, finished with an impeccable softness that belies their weight and density. A bronze foundry, constructed in the artist’s studio in Tepoztlán, Mexico, enables Allen to complete works on site. This instinctive shaping of resistant material draws upon both the process-based conceits of Surrealist automatism and the formal inventiveness of Constantin Brancusi and Samuel Beckett.

Allen’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, and his first monograph was published by Rizzoli Electa in 2020. The artist participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial where he gained recognition and a wider discovery of his work. In 2018, the Palm Springs Art Museum in California opened the two-person exhibition In Conversation: Alma Allen & JB Blunk, which traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art in 2019. In 2021, Kasmin staged an exhibition of Allen’s sculpture, encompassing both an indoor exhibition space and the Kasmin Sculpture Garden on the gallery’s rooftop in New York. Allen’s first exhibition in Europe was mounted by Mendes Wood DM in the same year, installed in the gallery’s Brussels venue as well as that city’s Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, and remained on view through early 2022. Later in 2022, Allen’s work was installed in the iconic central plaza at Rockefeller Center, New York.

Allen’s solo exhibition entitled Nunca Solo opened in February 2023 at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City. Staged in the museum founded by Diego Rivera to house his collection of pre-Columbian art, the exhibition brought together new works across the museum’s garden and gallery spaces, recently renovated to realize Rivera’s vision of establishing a contemporary arts center integrated into its natural surroundings.

Alma Allen

May 16 – June 22, 2024

509 West 27th Street, New York

The gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Alma Allen (b. 1970) brings together new freestanding sculpture and wall reliefs. This body of work evolves various compositional and material directions explored in Allen’s recent site-specific solo exhibition Nunca Solo at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City, demonstrating the artist’s ongoing experimentation into the ability of matter to embody contemplations on free will, consciousness, and the nature of time.

Alma Allen

May 4 – August 13, 2021

Kasmin Sculpture Garden

Kasmin is delighted to announce an upcoming exhibition of work by sculptor Alma Allen (b. 1970) spanning two of the gallery’s locations in Chelsea, New York. On view from May 4, 2021, the presentation in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden constitutes the artist’s first ever exhibition dedicated to large-scale outdoor sculpture. The exhibition continues at 514 West 28th Street with over twenty small-scale bronzes—works that function as both articulations of the polymorphous nature of Allen’s sculptural alphabet and as proposals for future large-scale works. By contextualizing these works amongst one another, the presentation demonstrates the variety of embodied forms that find expression through the artist’s hand.

Announcing Alma Allen on Park Avenue

April 16, 2025

Kasmin, in collaboration with The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks, announces an exhibition of 10 major sculptures by Alma Allen (b. 1970, Utah), which will be installed along Park Avenue in New York from May until September 2025. Unique bronze and onyx sculptures, including examples reaching over 10 feet tall and realized especially for the exhibition, will be on view at eight sites that span nearly 20 blocks of the Park Avenue Malls between East 52nd and East 70th Streets. This public exhibition is Allen’s largest outdoor installation to date.

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