Theodora Allen: Germ : Kasmin at Casa Siza, Mexico City

Kasmin at Casa Siza
Dr. Atl 103
Sta María la Ribera
Cuauhtémoc
06400 CDMX, Mexico

Wednesday–Saturday
11:00–6:00pm

Kasmin is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Theodora Allen opening in Mexico City on Tuesday, February 6, 2024. Through a visual language rooted in emblematic, esoteric, and personal sources, Allen creates ciphers for narratives both eternal and intimate. In Theodora Allen: Germ, the duality inherent to acts of becoming is explored through representations of seedlings, armor, and celestial geometry. Central to each painting is an idea, the “germ,” captured in a phase of transmutation that reflects generative cycles of symbols and nature. The exhibition opens concurrently with Zona Maco, and will inaugurate Casa Siza, a gallery and residence designed by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, whose stylistic approach to ‘poetic modernism’ is activated across two main galleries of the space.

Featuring a suite of Allen’s large-scale works on linen, alongside intimate compositions, these instances are defined as opposing forces in various states of development—for example, a seedling that grows upward while its roots extend downward. As portraits of potential, suspended in moments of change, Allen’s depictions of illusory forms in ambiguous settings invokes a psychological realm—images that do not follow the rules of our world but perceive a reality that exists beyond its limits.

Allen’s rigorous painting process pushes this evocative imagery further toward the ethereal. Numerous thin layers of oil paint are applied and removed until the surface becomes weathered, a push-and-pull that alternates between defining and dissolving the picture plane to reveal a light-emanating ground.

Two core formal strategies distinguish the paintings that comprise Germ. One approach favors soft depictions of dimension, where the volume of an object is described through the subtle modulation of tone. The other relies on the precision of geometric structures and framing devices, creating observation chambers—scenes glimpsed through portals and barriers. The line is used as a contrasting device, operating architecturally to define the boundaries of a composition or as a figurative element that deconstructs the image; a wound to the surface that reminds you it is a painting. Allen’s oeuvre hovers between these two modes of representation. Their restrained manner is neither definite nor changeable, a style that emulates the contradictions of her subjects.

Throughout Germ, the figure and ground collapse into one another; enigmatic spaces that allude to a symbolic rather than realistic domain. As iconographic ciphers, none of Allen’s depictions assume to represent the real version of themselves. The artist translates symbols from antiquity into a language of icons that endure across time. Just as the term ‘germ’ describes an organism capable of developing into a new one, the artist’s symbols alter our understanding of external signs as a reflection of ourselves—one that remains in a constant state of becoming.