About the work

Phillip Allen’s paintings often present brightly coloured, interconnecting volumes or repeating, distending patterns within more mutedly toned, wide-open zones. Bordering these spaces at the upper and lower limits of the canvas, Allen’s trick has been to lay down richly abundant lines of curling impasto paint: glorious blooms and bursts of multifarious colour that thickly combine to frame and deepen the visual drama at the centre of the picture. But what we see is never quite clear, never entirely ‘contained’. The graphic elements often offer hinting suggestions of buildings or other tall structures — they sometimes resemble wonky or wildly implausible monuments — but the precarious, piled-up shapes also at times allude to letters or numbers, as if a kind of coded communication were being proposed. Invariably, Allen shows us something being assembled — there is recurrent piecing-together of basic elements — but the results depart thrillingly from rational organisation, towards a more dream-like, open-ended and associative way of imagining a world. 

Date and country of birth

1967, GB