THEODORA ALLEN: OAK
Kasmin is pleased to present Oak, the Los Angeles-based artist Theodora Allen’s third exhibition with the gallery.
May 7 – July 25, 2025
Allen’s atmospheric oil paintings on linen depict natural phenomena and symbols chosen for their enduring presence in human history and culture, often drawing from mythology and medieval imagery. From hearts and infinity loops to rainbows and locusts, these subjects serve to underscore nature’s propensity for renewal following destruction.
Branches of an oak tree, a powerful symbol of wisdom, strength and endurance, reappear. Through compositional devices, such as gates, windows, and architectural niches, Allen's illusionistic spaces create a dynamic interplay between inclusion and exclusion. Her scenes emerge as ruins burgeoning with life, offering glimpses into a realm where the natural world and the metaphysical entwine.
Oak reintroduces elements from past paintings alongside new subject matter. In The Rising Up (I–V) (2025), the collapse of dense stone recalls sacred sites such as altars and neolithic tombs, as well as the aftermath of natural disasters—the faults of tectonic plates or geologic ruptures. Allen’s ruins, bathed in diffuse light, would appear lifeless save for the tender new growths of oak saplings that reach out toward the viewer. The distinctive silhouettes of their leaves, translucent and glinting, are scoured into the surface of the painting to reveal the polished white ground of the canvas below the pigment.
Allen centers non-human subjects as ciphers for consciousness and being, a position that resists the division of nature and culture. Until the Enlightenment (a period from which the artist frequently pulls) the world and everything in it was seen as living. The subsequent and systematic de-spiriting of our surroundings—the repression of the discernable hum of life—was rooted in an insistence that humans are not part of the environment but above it. This is a divide that Allen’s paintings resist. Through the collective language of symbols, the schism between our world and that of the paintings comes closer.