Alma Allen

Kasmin is pleased to announce the gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Alma Allen (b. 1970). The presentation, on view at 509 West 27th Street through June 22, brings together new freestanding sculpture and wall reliefs alongside the debut of the artist’s oil paintings. This new 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.

Allen continues to push the boundaries of sculpture, drawing on an intuitive sensitivity toward his materials to masterfully manipulate their form and surface through various processes at his studio and on-site foundry in Tepotzlán, Mexico. To create his sculptures, Allen devises a series of formal parameters to foster preconscious decision making by hand, a process that complements his research into ideas relating to the structure of the physical world. Whether carved from carefully-sourced rock and stone, or cast in bronze transformed by the hand-application of painterly patinas, his works retain a signature tactility as Allen translates hand-molded maquettes into both human and monumental scale. Formally, Allen’s sculptures convey a dynamic range, from works defined by their refined simplicity to those brimming with complex gesture. 

The artist brings his works to life via a hybrid, multi-stage process that encompasses both age-old and advanced technological methods of modeling form, imbuing his works with a timeless quality. First using his hands to develop his sculptures in clay, Allen repeatedly reworks small-scale models by establishing repetitive gestures, such as rolling his wrist or enacting a tight grasp onto the material. In the vein of automatism espoused by the Surrealists, Allen avoids conscious intention and finds pleasure in the uncanny through play and humor.

Allen’s freestanding and wall-based bronzes share the molten and buoyant appearance of his totemic stone works, with either polished surfaces or self-formulated patinas marked by a distinctly painterly quality that finds further expression in his works on canvas. Featuring tentacular, urchin-like protrusions together with drips and secretions that extend from a central mass, Allen accentuates the soft and supple quality of his conventionally rigid materials. The sheer monumentality of Allen’s freestanding bronzes impart a sense of mystery and primordial intrigue found in prehistoric, human-made megalithic structures. With their handmade idiosyncrasies, Allen’s works inspire their own chronologies of mythological origin.

Each of Allen’s works embodies the artist’s purposeful surrender to the creative instinct, a universal space where intuition and logic dissolve into one another. “I am interested in the spiritual work of sculptors, of communicating without language,” says Allen, “the effort to communicate, sometimes across time or understanding, with something that is incapable of returning speech.” This reflexive tactic defines Allen’s process. Challenging notions of prescribed meaning in favor of interconnectivity, the titling of Allen’s works (each Not Yet Titled) reflects the artist’s interest in psychological states of flow. While involving the large-scale embodiment of weight, gravity, and permanence, each of Allen’s formal investigations possess a sense of becoming where the momentary spark of creation remains palpable.