THEODORA ALLEN: PIERCE THE VALLEY
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is very pleased to present Pierce the Valley, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Theodora Allen. This marks Allen's first presentation in Paris.
March 17 — 28, 2026
Over the past decade, Allen has developed a distinct visual language attuned to the power of symbols and their cycles of regeneration, transformation, and persistence. The suite of works in Pierce the Valley reflects the artist’s sustained engagement with a process-based method of painting that has remained a defining and generative aspect of her practice—a strategy through which image, subject, and surface are simultaneously constructed and subtly dismantled.
Across her oeuvre, a sense of personal and collective vulnerability unfolds, particularly within the tension between culture and nature—an axis along which ancestral and mythological references converge with the ecological urgencies of the present. Images that carry a strata of time—symbols drawn from playing cards, body armor, and shields—appear as mutable forms, at once physical and psychological. Heart and diamond shapes mirror and partition one another, diagramming an enigmatic origin story. A worm tunnels through an apple, an agent of both decay and regeneration, while two monumental drill bits stand poised to enact violence upon an already barren landscape. Through the slow alchemy of her process, luminous archetypal forms emerge from fields of blue and grey, binding the physical to the metaphysical; the terrestrial to the celestial.
Painting on gessoed linen in a restrained palette of cool tones, Allen constructs her compositions by way of revision. Layers of paint are added and removed, gradually revealing the white ground beneath. With a soft, burnishing action, areas of luminosity are alternately revealed or dimmed. Within this oscillation between presence and absence, the negative shapes that comprise the underpainting gradually take shape as dimensional forms in space. The illusion of the image is frequently interrupted by abrasions that reveal the painting’s physical surface: scoured highlights and precise lines of lifted pigment dissolve and cut through the painted image, disrupting the seduction of illusion.
The result is a shimmering threshold between the visible and the imagined.
In their quiet atmosphere and disciplined symmetry, the works suggest that while human monuments fracture and ideologies erode, the generative forces of the universe continue their cycles within a broader, timeless order. Ruin becomes a threshold that gives way to transformation. Fracture itself becomes revelatory, exposing symbolic structures that have accompanied humanity since its earliest civilizations. Allen’s paintings resist fixed interpretation, remaining deliberately open-ended and inviting viewers to project their own meanings and cultural frameworks. Within this ambiguity, forces and energies appear to break apart and re-form in a slow rhythm. The paintings become apertures through which collapse and germination coexist within a single, breathing surface.
-Elisa Carollo
Theodora Allen (b. 1985, Los Angeles, California) holds an MFA in Painting from the University of California, Los Angeles (2014) and a BFA in Painting from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2009). She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency program in Skowhegan, ME (2011). Allen’s work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2021); Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL (2022); and Huset for Kunst & Design, Holstebro, Denmark (2023). Her paintings have also been included in exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2024), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Tucson, AZ (2014). In 2026, a large-scale public work will be installed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, as part of its Art Everywhere program. A monograph on Allen’s work, Saturnine, was published in 2021 in conjunction with her exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus. Her work is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX.