Jonathan Allen

Jonathan Allen grew up in a family of nine children in Georgia. In high school he won a scholarship to study painting in New York and now holds a BA in visual arts and art history from Columbia University. He participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace residency program and in The Bronx Museum of Art’s Artist in the Marketplace program, and has exhibited at numerous galleries and non-profit spaces in New York, including Caren Golden Fine Art, Oliver Kamm, The Lay-Up, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Artists Space, Socrates Sculpture Park, and PS122. His work recently entered the Microsoft Art Collection and in 2009 was exhibited at Wonderland Art Space, Copenhagen. In 2008, Jonathan Allen was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. His first solo exhibition in Italy opens in Winter 2010 with Real Arte. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

$35.00

Superstructure

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FOREWORD ESSAY BY PERSIS SINGH

Jonathan Allen’s collages and paintings combine pop imagery, abstraction, and propaganda to reflect the contradictions that arise from within our cultural and political climate. The various media he 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.