Alma Allen
Past exhibition
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Kasmin is delighted to present an exhibition of work by sculptor Alma Allen (b. 1970) spanning two of the gallery’s locations in Chelsea, New York. On view from May 4, 2021, the presentation in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden constitutes the artist’s first ever exhibition dedicated to large-scale outdoor sculpture. The exhibition continues at 514 West 28th Street with over twenty small-scale bronzes—works that function as both articulations of the polymorphous nature of Allen’s sculptural alphabet and as proposals for future large-scale works. By contextualizing these works amongst one another, the presentation demonstrates the variety of embodied forms that find expression through the artist’s hand.
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Allen’s connection to the natural world and its expressive possibilities goes back to his childhood in Utah, where a close proximity to the desert allowed the artist stretches of time roaming, whittling wood, and hand-carving stones that he found in the landscape. Unique, talismanic and intent on an interior life, Allen’s works are generously spirited and delightfully ambiguous despite their myriad formal, organic, and surrealist references. Many of them adopt the language of living things, caught germinating, hibernating, or evolving, conjured as though in a moment of becoming. Allen has said, “The sculptures are often in the act of doing something: They are going away, or leaving, or interacting with something invisible. Even though they seem static as objects, they are not static in my mind. In my mind they are part of a much larger universe. They are interacting with each other as well, with works I made 20 years ago.”
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Allen’s process begins with his instinctive hand-sculpting of intimately-scaled model clay or wax forms. Worked and reworked, these emerge gradually, along with their outcrops and eccentricities, as if asserting an individual existential will. The artist casts and finishes the sculptures using his own foundry on site at his studio in the hills of Tepoztlán, Mexico. While the works emanate a proud visual sumptuousness, collaborating beautifully with natural light, it is their magnetic tactility that defines them. Bronze, for all its heft, is rendered feather-light in large-scale works that unfurl towards the sky as if they still retain their former liquidity; not-quite-spheres sit squat like dew drops, bursting with latent energy. Surfaces are particularly expressive for Allen—the finishing of a bronze work, which the artist has compared to painting, includes welding smaller pieces together, brazing, polishing, and developing expressive chemical patinas.
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Pairing small-scale works with the monumental, the exhibition highlights Allen’s sculptural ambition and the variance in possibilities that his forms embody. Presented in the elevated Kasmin Sculpture Garden amongst a newly rewilded urban meadow, the artist’s works remain appropriately in conversation with nature, bringing elegant, biomorphic lines to the Chelsea skyline.
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Works
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About the Artist
Portrait by Diego Flores. -
Explore
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Alexis Ralaivao: Éloge de l’ombre (In Praise of Shadows)
May 15 – July 25, 2025 509 West 27th Street, New YorkFor Éloge de l’ombre (In Praise of Shadows), Ralaivao unveils a suite of new paintings rendered entirely in black and white. Working within the self-imposed parameters of a reduced palette, Ralaivao sharpens his attention to composition, light and shadow. In arresting portraits and still life tableaux, Ralaivao magnifies the most subtle of details at grand scale by strategically framing his subjects. Influenced by film noir, Ralaivao’s works absorb the viewer into a romanticized world of drama and suspense as if the viewer has arrived at a narrative in media res. -
Theodora Allen: Oak
May 7 – July 25, 2025 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkAllen’s atmospheric oil paintings on linen depict natural phenomena and symbols chosen for their enduring presence in human history and culture, often drawing from mythology and medieval imagery. From hearts and infinity loops to rainbows and locusts, these subjects serve to underscore nature’s propensity for renewal following destruction. Branches of an oak tree, a powerful symbol of wisdom, strength and endurance, reappear. Through compositional devices, such as gates, windows, and architectural niches, Allen's illusionistic spaces create a dynamic interplay between inclusion and exclusion. Her scenes emerge as ruins burgeoning with life, offering glimpses into a realm where the natural world and the metaphysical entwine. -
Alma Allen on Park Avenue
May 2 – September 30, 2025
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