JONATHAN ALLEN
ABOUT
  
CO
 LLAGE
WORKS ON PAPER
UPCOMING
    

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jonathan Allen was born in 1975 and holds a BA in visual arts and art history from Columbia University. Allen has exhibited at a number of New York galleries and nonprofit art spaces including Lu Magnus, PS122, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, Rotunda Gallery, Skylight Gallery, and Artists Space. He was selected for the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program, and the 2009-10 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency. In 2008, Jonathan Allen was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant; he has also received grants from the Puffin and George Sugarman Foundations. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, NY Arts Magazine, Exibart, and Vogue.com among others. Internationally he has exhibited in Copenhagen, Tokyo and Italy. In 2010 Allen's first international solo exhibition opened in Italy with Real Arte. In December 2010 Brooklyn Arts Press published SUPERSTRUCTURE, a monograph of Allen's work. Explore Thyself, his debut New York solo exhibition, opened in November 2011 at Lu Magnus. Allen lives and works in Brooklyn.
Allen is represented in New York by Lu Magnus and in Italy by Real Arte. For sales & general inquiries please contact info@lumagnus.com or info@realarte.it. Selected works are available at Deborah Page Projects in Austin, reachable at info@deborahpageprojects.com. You can reach Jonathan at info@jonathaneallen.com
ABOUT THE WORK
The various media Jonathan Allen uses—oil/acrylic, pen and ink, pencil, and newspaper and magazine cuttings—sometimes coalesce in formal harmony, though more often they serve to diagram the breakdowns triggered by irreconcilable clashes in perspective. If culture is a language of forces operating in mixed agreement—desire, ethics, history, money, power—then the unlikely fusions in Allen’s work represent a resonant voice in the conversation of who we are now. That Allen achieves this without sacrificing either aesthetic pleasure or contextual intelligibility is a credit to his resourcefulness and care, allowing for a dense and eccentric vision that lays bare our culture’s often jagged and convoluted messages.
-Joe Millar
The work of Jonathan Allen is composed of densely layered images and text that swirl, collide, and unravel into complex tableaux bordering on the fantastical and apocalyptic. Over the past few years, Allen has been working at the intersection of painting, drawing, and collage, crafting intricate paper and canvas compositions that reflect on the schizophrenia and cacophony of postmodern capitalist culture. His process begins with meticulous scavenging, culling images and text from a myriad of found sources, from fashion magazines and photographs to movie posters and other ephemera. By juxtaposing these snippets, often torn or spliced into jagged geometric shapes, Allen creates a scenic meshwork of abstract, festering landscapes—a jumbled palimpsest of contemporary culture. The subsequent incongruities work to engender fresh associations, and a unique pictorial language emerges from the artistry, one which engages notions of spectacle and mass mediation while commenting on the social inequity, alienation, and anomie associated with rapid urbanism and globalization.
-Persis Singh