Since the 1970s, Tim Allen has been producing an exciting body of work in which colour and movement ‘aspires to the condition of the physical’. They are action driven paintings made with traditional graining brushes and various other tools and custom built painterly devices that produce a series of parallel strokes and dazzling effects. Although essentially abstract these paintings feature images and qualities drawn from life.
Over the years Allen’s work has developed cyclically, from hard edge abstraction, through freeform multi-image paintings, to landscape based semi-abstractions focussing on the horizon or featuring apertures or vignettes and back again to abstraction. But they are always made using the same improvisatory approach.
This new circular stroke series draws together a number of disparate, sometimes contradictory, formal motifs and conceptual elements, and subjects or themes that have featured independent of one another in his work over the last fifty years at different times, in an attempt to marry these elements into a coherent and dynamic whole. Allen’s process is a perpetual event of remaking and revisiting, dancing from the past to the present, and these paintings present more than the sum of their parts and they generate a broad response in whoever’s looking at them, emotionally and intellectually.
Tim Allen was born in 1950 in Manchester and brought up in Durham City. He studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1968-72) and Goldsmiths College, London (1978-80). Since 1968 he has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and USA. His recent exhibitions include From the Ferry, Dahl Gallery, Luzern Switzerland, Dual Purpose at Turps Gallery London, Strukturen/Structures 2014 and Multilayer 2021 both curated by Ivo Ringe, featuring British, German and American painters at the Museum Wilhelm Morgner, Soest, Germany and British Abstract Painting in the Eighties, curated by Matthew Macauley, Lancaster Gallery, Coventry in 2020. His works are in many public and private collections.
The exhibition is accompanied by a short text by the artist.
