Alma Allen on Park Avenue
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Kasmin, in collaboration with The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks, presents an exhibition of 10 major sculptures by Alma Allen (b. 1970, Utah), installed along Park Avenue in New York until September 2025. Unique bronze and onyx sculptures, including examples reaching over 10 feet tall and realized especially for the exhibition, are on view at eight sites that span nearly 20 blocks of the Park Avenue Malls between East 52nd and East 70th Streets. This public exhibition is Allen’s largest outdoor installation to date.
The exhibition is the newest in a series of large-scale outdoor installations staged by Allen in the United States, Mexico and Belgium. Park Avenue provides a unique opportunity for New Yorkers to engage with the artist’s material explorations of consciousness, free will, and the nature of time, unexpectedly tranquil amongst the energetic velocity of the city. New York—an early source of inspiration for Allen, who created hand-sized sculptures using found marble from the city’s broken street curbs in the 1990s—serves as a dynamic setting for the artist’s new monumental works realized in bronze and onyx local to the region surrounding his studio in Tepotzlán, Mexico. Juxtaposing the artist’s primordial formations against the urban landscape, the exhibition encourages new perspectives on the elemental nature of Allen’s fluid, biomorphic sculptural language.
Celebrating the 45th anniversary of The Fund for Park Avenue, this marks the seventh exhibition organized by Kasmin in collaboration with The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks, following George Rickey: Monumental Sculpture on Park Avenue (2021), Alex Katz: Park Avenue Departure (2019), Will Ryman: The Roses (2011), Les Lalanne on Park Avenue (2009), Robert Indiana: LOVE Wall(2008) and Robert Indiana: ONE through ZERO (2003). The Park Avenue Malls provide a unique opportunity to display works of art, including the permanent installation of a major sculpture by Louise Nevelson at 92nd Street and previous exhibitions by Niki de Saint Phalle (2012), Yoshimoto Nara (2010), Beverly Pepper (2005), Bernar Venet (2004), Jean Dubuffet (2003) and George Rickey (2000), among others.
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Alma AllenNot Yet Titled, 2025bronze118 1/8 x 116 1/8 x 20 7/8 inches
300 x 295 x 53 cm -
Each of Allen’s works demonstrate the artist’s distinctive approach to sculpture as the manifestation of human intuition. In his studio in Mexico, where he has lived and worked since 2017, Allen creates small-scale clay models through a series of repetitive hand gestures, such as rolling his wrist or tightly grasping his fingers. He then scans his objects using computer technology before casting them in bronze at his on-site foundry, or employing a self-built robotic device to carve them out of a single piece of stone, at monumental scale. The resulting forms retain the softness and immediacy of the artist’s touch, appearing impossibly malleable despite their weight and density. Allen’s hand application of patinas to his bronzes results in painterly surfaces, further transforming the physical properties of his material.
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“I’ve always been fascinated by using art as a kind of mechanism to try to peer around the corners of reality.” —Alma Allen
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Allen’s sculptures share a timeless affinity with the earliest known carvings and creations around the world. Drawing on the artist’s archaeological interests and studies—from the petroglyphs in Utah to ancient stone vessels in Egypt, the Olmec heads of Mesoamerica, and Diego Rivera’s collection of pre-Columbian objects at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City—the works further explore humanity’s impulse to communicate with form.
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Alma AllenNot Yet Titled, 2024bronze70 x 138 x 41 inches
177.8 x 350.5 x 104.1 cm -
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An ineffable lifeforce charges Allen’s sculptures, each caught in a state of indeterminacy reflected in their shared titles, Not Yet Titled. They sharply twist, protrude and recede in eternal phases of formation, Approaching the limits of abstraction, a new bronze on the north mall of East 57th Street folds forward to resemble a human form embracing itself. Elsewhere, Allen’s manipulation of scale reflects the playful ethos of his practice, as in a new bronze situated between East 52nd and 53rd Streets that appears to balance a small ball at the top of a large, open curvature. At East 70th Street, three ascendant spirals respond to the flowers and trees along the Park Avenue Malls. Carved in onyx, a stone having formed in the earth over millennia, the sculptures inspire a dialogue with the ephemeral spring blooms around them, offering reflection on the nature of time.
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“There are all of these spirally, energetic sort of twists, almost like a shoot or an energy…They have this new-plant energy of trying to find the sun.” —Alma Allen
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About the Artist
Photo by Diego Flores -
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vanessa german: GUMBALL—there is absolutely no space between body and soul
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Alma Allen on Park Avenue
May 2 – September 30, 2025
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