NEW YORK, NY.- Kasmin is presenting 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.
Using Yucatan stone, onyx, and several variations of marble, Allen accesses the temporal scope and resonance of geological matter. A spiraling nautilus in one work echoes the material choice of a nearby fossilized stone whose smoothly carved surfaces are embedded with mollusk shells. Throughout each sculpture, Allen exploits the singular characteristics of stone, for example, a “bust” of striated onyx whose sedimentary veining and sinuous texture—hues of oxidized rust, pale cream, and desaturated ochre—is reminiscent of musculature, appearing at once earthen and corporeal.
For the first time, these sculptures are being shown alongside a series of large-scale oil paintings, establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue and connecting Allen’s visual vocabulary across media. Uncovering an unexplored dimension of the artist’s practice, the mark-making in Allen’s oil paintings recalls the twisting, animate forms of his works in bronze and stone. Since the 1990s, Allen has ritually turned to painting in tandem to his sculptural work to rejuvenate his creative energy. Composed of vibrant and energetic marks, Allen’s spontaneous gestures materialize the helical curves found in his sculptural practice. Electrified by their black grounds, vibrant hues appear arrested in motion, suspended against the obscurity of nondescript spaces. Creating space through an optical layering of tightly coiled brushstrokes, the immersive presence of Allen’s compositions recall processes of entropy, a scientific concept of transformation initiated by the fundamental existence of chance.
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.
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.
