Artist Registry


The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.




To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.

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Allison Blumenthal
Paris FR
Updated: 2024-11-24 11:03:46

STATEMENT OF WORK

I am primarily a painter, but also make drawings, sculpture and photographic work. I tend to work in “groups” that allow me to investigate a particular theme, idea, material, approach, or color palette. While these groups might be inspired by a variety of sources, ranging from careful observation of my natural surroundings, to poetry and language, or pattern and light and shadow, what unifies my practice is a deep connection to the landscape. I am part of a long line of artists whose work is nourished and driven by the natural world. I use my experience in and references to nature and the landscape as metaphor for thinking about human experience and questioning our anthropocentric hubris. Nature as a conduit to experience wonder and a mystic connection to a larger sense of meaning, but also as a way to examine histories of human violence. My painting, photographs, drawings and sculpture over the past fifteen years consistently draw on this source, built on years of attentive looking and questioning.

I have been shifting my way of working over the past year so that my approach aligns with my thoughts about the depiction of violence and grief. The paintings that I am interested in making now are bodily, messy, involving friction, scarring, covering over, failure. Bodily, because I am drawing into the surface of the canvas directly with oils or oil pastel and my fingers, working on the ground on unstretched canvas. Layers of paint become embedded and then scraped away, re-applied, and removed to reveal the underlying layers. This approach feels appropriate to the subject matter at hand, and marks a divergence from previous paintings that were made in one-shot, on a thin ground. There was little room for correction or mistakes, resulting in paintings that felt transparent and light, with one color applied to a thin ground (e.g. Hanami, Skeins, Champs). The group Night Gardens from 2022, while preceding the above mentioned work, is closer in spirit to my current interest, but uses painted contrasting line to delineate ambiguous and irregular spaces and forms on a dark ground.

My work is non-figurative and “unpeopled”, which might pose a paradox or challenge when thinking about human experience, but I believe strongly that abstract work can be political and also convey a deeply personal response to the world. I am not interested in the picturesque, nor an escape- I am aiming for the opposite: to draw the viewer in, to look hard at our non-humanity, and to question our constructed narratives.