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
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Explore
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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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