Alma Allen
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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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Alma Allen
May 16 – June 22, 2024 509 West 27th Street, New YorkThe gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Alma Allen (b. 1970) brings together new freestanding sculpture and wall reliefs. This 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. -
NARES TRACES
May 16 – June 22, 2024 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkThe fifteenth solo exhibition at the gallery of work by multidisciplinary artist Jamie Nares (b. 1953) examines over 100 works on paper in a variety of media—namely oil, ink, and enamel—made after refocusing her artistic attention from film to painting in the early 1980s. Coolly perceptive, Nares’ works on paper share the same conceptual focus on movement, rhythm, and measurements of time that has driven the artist’s various bodies of work over the last fifty years. This exhibition points to paper as an essential instrument in Nares’ ongoing exploration of these themes.
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