Background
Alma Allen was born on June 17, 1970, in Heber City, Utah, the United States, to devout Mormon parents.
Tepoztlán, Mexico
Alma Allen with a nearly 11-foot-tall piece in Tepoztlán, Mexico.
Mexico City, Mexico
Alma Allen, with his wife, Su Wu, wearing a vintage Romeo Gigli jacket, and their daughter, Isadora, at home in Mexico City.
Allen with one of his daughters.
Allen with his daughter, Frieda.
Allen enlisted the help of a giant robotic arm to help him sculpt and carve dense materials like marble and wood after developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Photograph by Lisa Eisner.
Alma Allen was born on June 17, 1970, in Heber City, Utah, the United States, to devout Mormon parents.
Alma is a self-taught artist.
Alma began his practice by hand carving salvaged materials into unique small objects. In his early twenties, he moved to New York City, and sold his miniature carvings on the street in SoHo, before catching the attention of designers nearby.
By 2006, after almost a decade in New York, Allen had relocated to Los Angeles, where he began designing furniture and creating large-scale sculptures. Soon, the strain, that carving put on his wrists and arms, became a problem. When stress fractures, followed by surgery, forced him to stop, he bought a used robotic arm from a Spanish auto shop and taught it how to carve for him.
It's worth noting, that, since 1991, Alma has had a number of solo exhibitions, including those, held at Cordell Taylor Gallery, Salt Lake City, Utah (1991), Aron Packer Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (1994, 1996), Anthony Greaney Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts (2008), Blum & Poe Gallery, Los Angeles, California (2015, 2019), among others.
Besides, Allen's works have also been shown at various group exhibitions, including "Alma + Adam + Commune + This Show", Heath Ceramics, Los Angeles, California (2010), "Function Dysfunction: Alma Allen, Ani Kasten, Adam Silverman", Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2012), "Small Sculpture", Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (2015), "Gold Rush", De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, California (2016), "In Conversation: Alma Allen & J.B. Blunk", Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California (2018) and "Collective/Collectible", Masa Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (2019), and others. In addition, Allen participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, where he gained recognition and a wider discovery of his work.
Currently, Alma lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico, where he had settled down in the winter of 2017. He continues to create works, with the use of stone, wood, marble and bronze, which are reminiscent of those, made by Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi. Alma's works reflect their ardor for experimentation, expressiveness and originality.
Psychologically charged and compulsively expressive, 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. Often realized in stone, wood or bronze - materials, hand-selected from quarries or foraged from landscapes in the area, surrounding Alma's studio - the sculptor's works emit a mysterious and ineffable life force. These 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 and stone grain patterns are accented to highlight their material history. Whichever medium Allen chooses, the works' final forms and their particular outcrops and eccentricities seem as though they have been conjured by the artist during their making, born of a wordless conversation between sculptor and object.
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 employs, 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 onsite. 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.
Quotations: "I like making new things every day. When I was working by hand, I would often have a hundred pieces going at a time. I still do that, but I don't produce all of them. And I don't make drawings. Whenever I have a plan, I end up changing it. Maybe that's why I have always loved working small."
In his childhood, Alma hunted for Native American petroglyphs and other cave art, taking a pocketknife to the felled wood he found and carving tiny sculptures.
Alma is married to Su Wu, a writer and independent curator. Their marriage produced a daughter - Isadora. Allen has another daughter, named Frieda, from a previous relationship.