When carving or casting, Alma Allen makes his giant, lopsided tuber-like forms with spontaneous shifts in direction and with maquettes instead of preparatory drawings. He prefers not to give them titles and explores different scales and shiny patinas or gritty surface textures, as in Not Yet Titled (2014), Untitled (2013), Not Yet Titled (2019), and Not Yet Titled (2020).
Read MoreRelying on the sensitivity of clay when pressured by his fingertips, to create larger works he designed a robot for his Mexican studio as an extension of his (now failing) arm.
Often made as smaller prototypes when Allen was homeless, his strangely Surrealist works as polished bronzes hint at vulnerability and sensitivity, alluding to brittle ancient shells, writhing pods, ossified but striated viscera, and internal mental pain.
Although abstract, the artist's sculptures are richly allusive. They seem weightless, suggesting the convulsive and airborne together—and having an unusual corporeal anxiety very different from modernist sculptors like Constantin Brancusi or Isamu Noguchi, who embrace a purer, less bodily, more pristine form of geometry.
Allen often makes functional domestic craft objects as well as contemplative sculpture, these also having much attention devoted to surface detail.
