Alma Allen
Past exhibition
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Kasmin is delighted to present its first solo exhibition of work by sculptor Alma Allen (b. 1970, USA.) Opening on January 23, 2020, at 509 West 27th Street, the presentation brings together 12 large-scale works realized in bronze, wood, and stone. Responding to the architecture of the gallery, Allen demonstrates unprecedented ambition in the works’ scale. Included in the exhibition is his tallest sculpture to date—a bronze measuring approximately 16 feet at its highest point.
A career-spanning monograph published by Rizzoli Electa and organized by Kasmin and Blum & Poe, who also represent the artist, will include text from Douglas Fogle and Glenn Adamson, and is due for publication in Spring 2020.
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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.
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Often realized in materials hand-selected from quarries or foraged from landscapes in the area surrounding his studio, the works emit a mysterious and ineffable lifeforce. The 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 grain patterns are accented to highlight their material history, and stones such as peach onyx, pale green cantera, and obsidian vibrate with a sense of mysticism. Whichever medium Allen chooses, the works’ final forms and their particular outcrops and eccentricities are conjured by the artist during their making, born of a wordless conversation between sculptor and object.
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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 Tepoztlán, 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.
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Works
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About the Artist
Portrait by Diego Flores. -
Explore
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Les Lalanne: Zoophites
From the Collection of Caroline Hamisky Lalanne
Curated by Paul B. Franklin April 4 – May 9, 2024 509 West 27th Street, New York -
William N. Copley: LXCN CPLY
April 4 – May 11, 2024 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkWilliam N. Copley: LXCN CPLY will explore the artist’s repertoire of recurring imagery and is the first exhibition to center Copley’s development of his signature visual language. LXCN CPLY draws this thread through five decades of the artist’s career, focusing on a selection of exemplary paintings and drawings from the late 1940s through the 1990s, alongside archival material, documentation and key objects relating to the work on view. The exhibition is co-organized with the William N. Copley Estate, which Kasmin has represented since 2010. -
Sara Anstis: Small Works
April 30 – May 30, 2024 514 West 28th Street, New York
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