For the fourth edition of Independent 20th Century, Luxembourg + Co. presents a display of collages by Nicol Allan (1931-2019) and a large standing mobile by Alexander Calder (1898-1976). Reimagining what the post-war branch of abstract collage had in store at the aftermath of Matisse's cut-outs, the display looks at two artists whose practice was deeply invested in the notions of balance, weight, scale and mobility using a fragmentary and formal artistic language.
Born in Los Angeles, Nicol Allan spent his formative years as a young artist in London and Paris. Allan's reclusive personality would drive him away from the artworld stage on numerous occasions throughout his career, nevertheless, his collages had gathered ranks of followers wherever he travelled. Between 1965 and 1967, Allan began experimenting with paper collages for the first time, engaging in dialogue with the history of abstraction and papier collé. Executed using elaborate methods of dying and pasting, Allan's small-scale collages are made with hand dyed papers and composed in a unique method that allowed the artist to express pictorial depth, texture and a wealth of emotional themes at once figurative and fundamentally abstract. While he also made watercolour, pencil and ink drawings, it was these compositions that became his focal practice.
In 1980, Allan wrote this of his work, a rare and significant endeavour at articulation of his themes: 'These small works which are arranged in series of heads and masks, rain, waves and sea, mountains and dancers are an interpretation in simple form of inner states of mind, an attempt to fuse content and form…in the end, these works are about rising in light and falling in darkness, about falling in light and rising in darkness.'
The pairing of Allan's collages with Calder's large standing mobile, Crag with White Flower and White Discs, of 1974, reveals two artists who used nature as a source of inspiration, at once monumental and intimate, mobile and deeply stable, all using a formal pictorial jargon.