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Bio
“I invite you to fly into my Dream.
I want to take you inside, deep inside. And we are taking the outside with us; we are taking it all with us… all the faces, all the mirrors, all the reflections. And when we let it out into the real world, it will feel familiar, but it won’t be.”
“Allois paints presences. Her figures manifest conditions, sliding away from personality and into mood. A particular character may present itself as a child or adult, man or beast, but its identity gives way almost immediately to its nuance. Mourners are not just sad; they become sadness. Nudes cavorting with animals are not just modest; they become modesty itself. Personages making their way through a landscape come to embody self-containment, self-absorption. This is real abstraction, dissolution of the seen into the sensed.
The humanoids (and animoids) Allois paints exhibit many of the same distortions and contortions that we see in so much current “lowbrow,” or “newbrow,” painting. But instead of employing an illustrator’s insistent descriptive precision, so prevalent in “newbrow,” Allois engages the brush and palette of a modern painter, luminously impressionist, impetuously expressionist, oddly surrealist, providing her characters with soul even as she compromises their visual substance – indeed, by compromising that substance. She renders her figures vaguely, but they are not vague; as ciphers for sensations and sensibilities, they must be fuzzy to the eye in order to be credible to the heart.
Do Allois’ characters and creatures tell stories? Of a sort; they are active, always engaged in doing something. But before their efforts harden into events, they evolve into a dream state where purpose fades into symbol. Do they seem like fugitives from a children’s book, or a comic strip? They seem related to such storytelling formats, but resist telling such stories. They are fugitives only from Allois’ own imagination – or from her own dreams. Some seem so primitive, so atavistic, that they ring some far-off bell of familiarity in our minds. Some seem not simply alien, but related to the alien caricature that has suffused through our popular culture – the slight bodies, swollen hairless heads, huge slit eyes and pointy chins taking off from the description provided by witnesses to the “autopsies” supposedly performed on spacemen by the U.S. Army at Los Alamos in the late 1940s.
These figures, then, are others and at the same time are us. They don’t simply constitute Allois’ cast of characters; they stand in for any of us. The yogic construct of the soul is as a tiny homunculus seated or curled at the base of the heart. This must be the homunculus with whom, in many variations, Allois populates her canvases”.
Peter Frank
Los Angeles
November 2006
Peter Frank is art critic for Los Angeles Times, Angeleno Magazine, LA Weekly and is Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum.
Allois work deals with dislocation and estrangement, at times employing decidedly cute characters in innocently grotesque or strange situations. Allois’ paintings portray characters that visually embody states of mind, from the mischievous to the manic.
The occult and metaphysical themes recurring in the work call to mind the universally recognizable issue of the unknown origins of the soul, and the pre-linguistic mind. Disproportionate, malformed creatures inhabit barren landscapes, where our attention is refocused on the interrelations between characters. The figures seem alien or fantastical, but at the same time they are highly relate-able. The figures evoke raw emotions in the audience by being vague to the visual senses but obvious to the spirit.
BG Gallery (Bleicher/Golightly/Gorman)
Artist CV
| ABOUT ALLOIS | Born in Lutherstad Wittenberg, Germany 1969. Raised in Wittenberg, Germany and Legnica, Poland 1969-1989 Education: National Academy of Art, Ukraine, 1993. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. |
| · 2018 23rd Annual Los Angeles Art Show, bG Gallery Bergamot Station – Santa Monica, California
· 2017 Solo Show “Nothing But Dreaming” at bG Gallery, November 18 – December 13 · 2017 LAAA Annual Benefit Auction · 2017 CASA Wine + Art/ Auction February 25th · 2017 Art Hearts Fashion 2017, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, March 14 – 17 · 2017 22nd Annual Los Angeles Art Show, bG Gallery Bergamot Station-Santa Monica, California, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California LA ART SHOW, presented by bG Gallery, Los Angeles · 2016 21st Annual Los Angeles Art Show, bG Gallery Bergamot Station-Santa Monica, California, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California LA ART SHOW, presented by bG Gallery, Los Angeles · 2016 LAAA Annual Benefit Auction · 2016 bG Gallery Bergamot Station, “Multiworlds”, Santa Monica, California2016 bG Gallery Bergamot Station, “Grayscale Wonderland II”, Santa Monica, California · 2016 bG Gallery Bergamot Station, “Summer Group Exhibition”, Santa Monica, California · 2015-16 bG Gallery Bergamot Station, “Gifted”, Santa Monica, California · 2015 20th Annual Los Angeles Art Show, bG Gallery Bergamot Station-Santa Monica, California, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California · 2015 – Solo Show ‘No Particular Night or Morning’ Nov. 14 -December 9, bG Gallery, Santa Monica · 2015 bG Gallery Bergamot Station, “144”, Santa Monica, California · 2014 Schomburg Gallery, “Poetry in Colors”, MAA Juried Exhibition, Santa Monica, California · 2014 bG Gallery Bergamot Station, “Spectrum-Gestalt”, Santa Monica, California · 2014 bG Gallery (Bleicher/Golightly/Gorman) – Ocean Avenue, “Orgone Accumulators”, Santa Monica California · 2014 19th Annual Los Angeles Art Show, bG Gallery Bergamot Station-Santa Monica, California, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California · 2013-2014 bG Gallery (Bleicher/Golightly/Gorman), “From Big Things, Little Things Grow”, Santa Monica, California · 2013 Schomburg Gallery at Bergamot Station, “Winter Spirit”, MAA Juried Exhibition, Santa Monica, California · 2013 18th Annual Los Angeles Art Show, Project Space, bG Gallery Bergamot Station-Santa Monica, California, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California · 2013 bG Gallery (Bleicher/Golightly/Gorman), “Objectified II”, Santa Monica, California · 2013 Schomburg Gallery at Bergamot Station, “Still Life and Beyond”, MAA Juried Group Exhibition, Santa Monica, California · 2013 bG Gallery (Bleicher/Golightly/Gorman), “Winter Tides”, Santa Monica, California · 2012 Bleicher/Golightly Gallery, “Play Space”, Santa Monica, California · 2012 17th Annual Los Angeles Art Show, Project Space, bG Gallery Bergamot Station-Santa Monica, California, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California · 2012 Bleicher/Golightly Gallery, “Play Space”, Santa Monica, California · 2012 – Solo Show, Jean Marc Gallery, Los Angeles · 2012 Bleicher Gallery La Brea Anniversary Exhibition, Los Angeles, California · 2012 Bleicher Gallery La Brea, “Print x Print”, Los Angeles, California · 2012 Bleicher/Golightly Gallery, “Sound Works”, Santa Monica, California · 2012 Schomburg Gallery at Bergamot Station, “Enchanted Spaces”, MAA Juried Exhibition, Santa Monica, California · 2011 Bleicher Gallery La Brea, “Soft Machine UT”, Los Angeles, California · 2011 Bleicher/Golightly and Hamilton Galleries, “Animal Magnetism”, Santa Monica, California · 2011 Solo Show, Jean Marc Gallery, Los Angeles · 2011 Bleicher/Golightly Gallery, “Scapes I”, Santa Monica, California · 2011 – Solo Show, Rebecca Molayem Gallery, Los Angeles · 2010 – Solo Show, Jean Marc Gallery, Los Angeles · 2010 – Bleicher/Golightly Galler · 2010 – Bleicher Gallery, Los Angeles · 2010 – Solo Show, Canvas Gallery, Malibu, CA · 2009 – Solo Show, Icosahedron Gallerie, New York · 2008 – Solo Show, Hangar Gallery, Santa Monica · 2008 – Solo Show, Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, MA · 2008 – Solo Show, Icosahedron Gallerie, New York · 2007 – Solo Show, Montserrat Gallery, New York · 2007 – Nancy MargolisGalery, New York · 2007 – Solo Show, Icosahedron Gallerie, New York · 2007 – Solo Show, Lev Moross Gallery, Los Angeles · 2007 – Solo Show, James Gray Gallery, Santa Monica · 2006 – Solo Show, Lev Moross Gallery, Los Angeles · 2005 – Solo Show, Lev Moross Gallery, Los Angeles · 2005 – “Life in Contrast,” Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles · 2005 – Solo Show, Montserrat Gallery, New York · 2004 – “Unity & Diversity 2,” Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles 2003 – “Unity & Diversity 1,” Pacific Design Center, Los Angeled |
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| EXHIBITIONS | · Fine Art Novel “THE BLACK GONDOLIER” by Fritz Leiber. Fine Art Novel “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER/USHER II” by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Allois Animation “THE BLACK GONDOLIER” by MTV. |
| Fine Art Novel “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER/USHER II” by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Allois, Gauntlet Press 2010 MIDLIFE DRAMA by Irit Kedem, Publishing House of General Union of Writers in Israel 2008 (Cover Illustration by Allois) ART News, September 2005 Artist Interviews Magazine 2005 Malibu News February 12 2004 Artis Spectrum vol.12 2004 |