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 Tepotzlán, 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.