ART-PREVIEW:Alma Allen
Alma Allen is a self-taught artist who began his practice by hand carving salvaged materials into unique small objects. Allen moved to New York in his early twenties and sold the miniature carvings on the street in SoHo, before catching the attention of designers nearby. After almost a decade in New York, Allen relocated to Los Angeles where he began designing furniture and creating large-scale sculptures. After repeated injury from obsessive over-carving left Allen unable to use his hands for extended periods, the artist built a robotic system out of spare assembly line parts and developed its proprietary software as a mechanized extension of hand-carving.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive
Primarily constructed in stone, wood, and bronze, Alma Allen’s sculptures are reminiscent of those by Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi, reflecting their ardor for experimentation, expressiveness, and originality. Allen’s process is organic and oftentimes the material itself dictates the final form—whether it is anthropomorphic or non-representational. Alma Allen in his new solo exhibition presents new sculptures made after the his recent relocation from Joshua Tree in California to Tepoztlan in Mexico. The works continue the compulsive and prolific explorations of a singular sculptor with a recognizable and idiosyncratic visual sensibility, who creates psychologically charged forms in stone, wood, and bronze. In talisman-like handheld objects in silver and bronze, and in large-scale forms contoured from 228- burls of wood and slabs of stone, Allen’s works are exacting in their fluidity. These non-referential forms at once evoke the familiar and the nameless, drawn from the trauma and willfulness that have marked the artist’s life and his own specificities of resonance and recollection. In Allen’s sculptures, and in their intimations of squeezing and stabbing and smoothing, is a distillation of visceral pains and pleasures: of a clenching or a letting go or opening one’s eyes to the sun after a nap. How the action of sculpting becomes the sculpture itself is apparent in Allen’s work, the result of a physical acting out, punctuated by its recurring themes of organs and violence. Many of the works present a single minimal motion, carved and polished over the course of many months. It is a laborious process, to seek immediacy. These sensuous biomorphic works are all called “Not Yet Titled”, the artist says, “I don’t title my work because I don’t want people to think of me when they see it. I prefer to be hidden”. Allen offers a new body of work unaffiliated with a particular current movement but connected to a long canonical history of sculpture as compulsion and consolation.
Info: Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 20/7-17/8/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blumandpoe.com
