May means the bright-hued tulips are in full bloom on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. This year, however, New Yorkers will now find the colorful flowers accompanied by ten of Alma Allen’s sculptures, dotting the avenue’s lush malls between 53rd and 70th streets. Either in bronze or onyx, the sculptures, which are each titled Not Yet Titled, portray both humans—like a resting body with tightened limbs—or nature—tulips preparing to bloom.
“I am trying to see my own subconsciousness, because I am looking around the corners of reality,” Allen tells ELLE Decor.
The Utah-born artist drafts a smaller version of each sculpture in clay at his Tepoztlan studio, south of Mexico City. Each clay figurine—occasionally so fragile that Allen keeps it in the fridge—then goes through a 3D scanning process to render a template for its blown-up version. Allen then often wanders to his in-house bronze foundry to create the massive shiny replica of his miniatures. Occasionally, though, he leaves the task to a large robot which he programmed to precisely carve onyx while still maintaining the traits of his intimate hand gestures.
The Park Avenue sculptures, like much of Allen’s work, features ambitiously-scaled forms in allusive silhouettes and disarming colorations. The Fund for Park Avenue—the organization in charge of the street’s flowers every season—enlisted their Sculpture Committee to oversee the project in celebration of the organization’s 45th anniversary.
For The Fund’s President Emerita Barbara McLaughlin, the collaboration “emphasizes the power of contrast,” and, she tells ELLE Decor, “the boldness of sculpture and the delicate beauty of tulips.”
Allen’s other works have been exhibited in Kasmin Gallery’s roofgarden on the High Line and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. From Brancusi to the Bronze Age, the self-taught artist looks beyond any time period to see the soul beneath. “I’ve never understood seeing a separation between the ancient and the modern,” he says. “The flow and the continuum in my work is about all of it being a sculpture.”
The presentation’s largest statement is a bronze uneven circle which comes together at its peak. There, a shiny sphere reflects the surrounding high-rise-dominated panorama, including the Seagram Building, as well as the flowers beneath it. At 119 inches high, the work traveled in its own flatbed truck from Mexico to New York. A trio of modest size onyx sculptures bookends the vertical lineup on 70th street—their spiraling pink-colored forms recall industrial tools and young buds.
The installation at night on Park Avenue.
He notices the nod to flowers in his sculptures. “Some of the works seem to be growing to reach for something… like the tulips.”
Alma Allen on Park Avenue is on view through September.
Osman Can Yerebakan is a New York-based freelance art and culture writer and curator.
