PHILLIP ALLEN

NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to announce a presentation of new paintings by Phillip Allen. The exhibition will open 21 May at 520 West 21st Street and remain on view through 11 July 2020. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Phil King.

Phillip Allen’s series of works DeepDrippings point to the artist’s move towards the formulation of a participatory, sensorial and immaterial experience for the viewer. The paintings are covered variously with concentrated and dense applications of voluminous oil paint.

The series embodies the artist’s notion of painting as a means of delivering an idea through trace or gesture. Phillip Allen’s DeepDrippings are at once colorful and life-affirming. They create exuberant movement that the viewer may observe as joyful, indefinite or chaotic.

Describing the discovery of his repetitive and distinctive way of capturing an image, Phil King writes “Phillip Allen’s paintings seem able to present color as a kind of leftover reality that somehow has the power to insist—with tremendous force and compressed intensity. When we view his paintings in groups, experiencing them laid out in exhibitions, a sense of different self-contained intensities—lined up and insistent, waiting together—is created.”

Perhaps what is most compelling about Phillip Allen’s use of seemingly disparate elements of color and texture in these works, is the means with which he aligns and arranges them to an effect of expressing what is in fact inexpressible across human life, thought and emotion.

As Phil King notes in in his catalogue essay On Listening to Phillip Allen’s Paintings, “we discover that the paint itself revolts from any intended and presupposed program. The paint in the actual painting allows a sensation of dappled light to be loosely created, a sensation created out of a sense of excavation in which we do not know what we will find.”

PHILLIP ALLEN lives and works in London, United Kingdom. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1990 from Kingston University and his Master of Fine Art in 1992 from Royal College of Art. He teaches at the Royal College of Art in London, United Kingdom and has been a visiting lecturer at various colleges, including the Ruskin School of Art at University of Oxford, Goldsmiths at University of London and The Royal Academy of Arts.

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520 West 21st Street

21 May - 11 July 2020

Selected Works

Press Release