Alma Allen

Kasmin is pleased to present the gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Alma Allen (b. 1970, USA). The exhibition brings together a combination of new sculpture in bronze, cast in the artist’s foundry, and works carved from stone sourced from areas surrounding his studio in Tepotzlán, Mexico. Realized with hybrid processes both ancient and cutting-edge, Allen’s sculptures are imbued with a timeless quality while conveying a dynamic range—from works defined by their refined formal simplicity to those brimming with complex gesture.

Allen approaches sculpture by devising a series of formal parameters to foster pre-conscious and intuitive decision making via the hand, a process that complements his research into ideas relating to the structure of the physical world. This new body of work evolves various compositional and material directions explored in Allen’s recent institutional 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.

Alma Allen (b. 1970, Herber City, Utah) lives and works in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Allen’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, and his first monograph was published by Rizzoli Electa in 2020. The artist participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial where he gained recognition and a wider discovery of his work. In 2018, the Palm Springs Art Museum in California opened the two-person exhibition In Conversation: Alma Allen & JB Blunk, which traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art in 2019. In 2021, Kasmin staged an exhibition of Allen’s sculpture, encompassing both an indoor exhibition space and the Kasmin Sculpture Garden on the gallery’s rooftop in New York. Allen’s first exhibition in Europe was mounted by Mendes Wood DM in the same year, installed in the gallery’s Brussels venue as well as that city’s Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, and remained on view through early 2022. Later in 2022, Allen’s work was installed in the iconic central plaza at Rockefeller Center, New York.

Allen’s solo exhibition entitled Nunca Solo opened in February 2023 at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City. Staged in the museum founded by Diego Rivera to house his collection of pre-Columbian art, the exhibition brought together new works across the museum’s garden and gallery spaces, recently renovated to realize Rivera’s vision of establishing a contemporary arts center integrated into its natural surroundings.