BASIE Allen

 
 
 
 

Basie Allen (b. 1989, New York City) uses poetry and painting to explore the space between living in cities and being in nature. Through a process of layering written text, paint, décollage, and transfer, Allen experientially mimics the sensation of putting on boots and walking into a landscape. The work is accentuated by cultural and personal identity, memory, and gestural abstraction.

Allen’s use of carpentry and the grid brings his work into direct communication with the city itself through ideas of the architecture of form. By painting on his own camping tarps and then transferring the image onto muslin and linen, Allen is metaphorically and literally pulling from his past, asking the viewer to wonder, “Is nature a bigoted term?” His work attempts to deepen this question.

Allen’s work has been exhibited at Eric Firestone (East Hampton, 2024), V1 (Copenhagen, 2024), MoMA PS1 (Queens, 2024), Massimodecarlo (Milan, 2022), Olympia (New York, 2021), and Marlborough Contemporary (New York, 2018). NADA Miami 2024 marks the artist’s first two-person participation at an art fair in the United States. Allen will have a solo exhibition at Olympia San Francisco in 2025.

His debut collection of poetry, Palm-Lined with Potience, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2023.

Basie Allen, Squares for Quik Trak Bobby, 2024, Tarp transfer, acrylic, pastel, spray paint, collage on canvas, 59.5 x 59.5 x 2.5 in (151.1 x 151.1 x 6.4 cm)