Lu Magnus invites you to Explore Thyself, Jonathan Allen’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Opening reception for the artist is on Friday November 4, 2011, 6-9pm. The exhibition runs through Sunday December 18.
Explore Thyself is an exhibition of new mixed-media works by Jonathan Allen. Engaging the contemporary cultural landscape, Allen’s latest body of work merges drawing, painting, and collage techniques. Explore Thyself, a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s book on the journey of spiritual discovery, Walden, suggests the e... Read more
Lu Magnus invites you to Explore Thyself, Jonathan Allen’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Opening reception for the artist is on Friday November 4, 2011, 6-9pm. The exhibition runs through Sunday December 18.
Explore Thyself is an exhibition of new mixed-media works by Jonathan Allen. Engaging the contemporary cultural landscape, Allen’s latest body of work merges drawing, painting, and collage techniques. Explore Thyself, a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s book on the journey of spiritual discovery, Walden, suggests the expansive and open approach to media and imagery that Allen’s work engenders, inviting viewers into dialogue with materials familiar to them: subway maps, sales circulars, dollar bills, advertisements, magazines and other popular periodicals. Allen compels his viewers to pause and see the works as a reflection of their own daily realities and how one would transcend the quotidian urban life.
With images culled from art history, pop culture and current events, Allen reassembles images in surreal dreamscapes. These dreamscapes are often fragmented, abstracted and enigmatic, opening a critical window on today’s political and environmental condition. Entwining these materials with painting and drawing, Allen imagistically evokes the complexity and absurdity of contemporary life and the challenges of retaining humanity amidst the alienating effects of our heavily mediated modernity. The tactility and layers of Allen’s paintings reflect the complexity and the existential dilemma of the human condition. Alternately poetic and political, celebratory and critical, uplifting and dark, these works are deeply reflective of a new cultural conversation about pop culture, technology, media and what it means to be part of a larger social fabric.
Allen’s visual deluge is a result of weaving the immediacy of images from various contemporary media with classical formal arrangements of monumental form and content. Architecture, the ultimate symbol of Man’s presence, structures social spaces; framing isolated figures and deconstructing pop imagery, Allen deals with the issue of location, space and culture, which is forged of everyday discouragement and discontent, mitigated by either a stoic determination or an inexorable sense of optimism. In light of this collision between a romantic ideal and the often harsh and depressing reality of contemporary life, particularly in the aftermath of recent natural and man-made disasters, Allen begs the transcendental question of the legacy of the 21st century.
Born in 1975, Jonathan Allen 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 PS122, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Exit Art. In 2008, Allen was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. In 2009-2010, he participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency. In 2010, Brooklyn Arts Press published his first artist monograph, SUPERSTRUCTURE. In December 2010, Allen’s first international solo exhibition opened in Italy. Allen currently lives and works in New York City.
