Alma Allen
Past exhibition
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Kasmin is delighted to present an 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.
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Allen’s connection to the natural world and its expressive possibilities goes back to his childhood in Utah, where a close proximity to the desert allowed the artist stretches of time roaming, whittling wood, and hand-carving stones that he found in the landscape. Unique, talismanic and intent on an interior life, Allen’s works are generously spirited and delightfully ambiguous despite their myriad formal, organic, and surrealist references. Many of them adopt the language of living things, caught germinating, hibernating, or evolving, conjured as though in a moment of becoming. Allen has said, “The sculptures are often in the act of doing something: They are going away, or leaving, or interacting with something invisible. Even though they seem static as objects, they are not static in my mind. In my mind they are part of a much larger universe. They are interacting with each other as well, with works I made 20 years ago.”
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Allen’s process begins with his instinctive hand-sculpting of intimately-scaled model clay or wax forms. Worked and reworked, these emerge gradually, along with their outcrops and eccentricities, as if asserting an individual existential will. The artist casts and finishes the sculptures using his own foundry on site at his studio in the hills of Tepoztlán, Mexico. While the works emanate a proud visual sumptuousness, collaborating beautifully with natural light, it is their magnetic tactility that defines them. Bronze, for all its heft, is rendered feather-light in large-scale works that unfurl towards the sky as if they still retain their former liquidity; not-quite-spheres sit squat like dew drops, bursting with latent energy. Surfaces are particularly expressive for Allen—the finishing of a bronze work, which the artist has compared to painting, includes welding smaller pieces together, brazing, polishing, and developing expressive chemical patinas.
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Pairing small-scale works with the monumental, the exhibition highlights Allen’s sculptural ambition and the variance in possibilities that his forms embody. Presented in the elevated Kasmin Sculpture Garden amongst a newly rewilded urban meadow, the artist’s works remain appropriately in conversation with nature, bringing elegant, biomorphic lines to the Chelsea skyline.
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Works
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About the Artist
Portrait by Diego Flores. -
Explore
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Robert Indiana:
February 27 – March 29, 2025 509 West 27th Street, New York
The Source, 1959–1969Kasmin presents Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969, a focused survey of the transformative decade in which Indiana established his unique artistic language, achieving wide recognition and cementing his place as an icon of American art. Featuring 20 works drawn exclusively from the artist’s personal collection as endowed by Indiana to the Star of Hope Foundation, the exhibition includes an example from the artist’s first edition of LOVE sculptures, conceived in 1966 and executed between 1966—1968, and a vitrine display of archival materials including some of the artist’s journals. This exhibition marks Kasmin’s first collaboration with the Star of Hope Foundation, which was established by the artist in his lifetime, and the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of work by Indiana since 2003. -
Pablo Dávila:
February 27 – March 29, 2025 297 Tenth Avenue, New York
Why Did You Take My Watch?The first solo exhibition of Mexico City-based artist Pablo Dávila (b. 1983), Why Did You Take My Watch? features new works that iterate Dávila’s research-based process in various media. Employing a visual language to encapsulate complex systems, theories and ideas, Dávila’s works offer poetic reflections on the perception of time and space.
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