Nicol Allan (1931-2019)

Nicol Allan worked in various mediums -- paper collages, sumi, wood reliefs, watercolors, oils, and, most consistently, paper collages, almost always on a very small scale. These physically intimate works often allude to the vast physicality of the natural world. As writer and art historian, Rye Dag Holmboe, has written in Nicol Allan: Collages (Slimvolume, London, 2021), “It is difficult to find the right words to describe the experience of these collages, a difficulty that is also met when trying to think about the other works on paper Allan produced throughout his life, which changed and developed in significant ways, but are also unusually consistent. To say that the collages are small, for instance, tells only half of the story. The works only occasionally refer to the outside world, the world that both frames and contains them, and in the absence of such a referent the collages undermine the very notion of scale. Their papered surfaces may be small in relation to the human body that perceives them, small in relation to a great deal of the best-known abstract art produced in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, but it is difficult to put a measure on colour. How big is pale blue? Or ochre? Or vermillion? The answer to these questions may depend on whether colour is seen as an adjective or as a substance. Meanwhile, if the works look small when framed and hung on a wall, they feel much more expansive in the imagination. Some of the collages take on almost cosmic proportions, even as they never let you forget that they are made up of small pieces of coloured paper.”

As the artist himself once wrote, “In the end, these works are about rising in light and falling in darkness, about falling in light and rising in darkness.”

For Holmboe’s essay that situates Nicol Allan's oeuvre within the context of twentieth century art, click here.

Nicol Allan’s parents were Scottish immigrants to the United States, and he lived and worked in both the U.S. and Great Britain. For an essay by the sinologist, Sarah Allan, that discusses his difficult childhood, the man himself, and the unusual life they shared, click here.

Galleries that have exhibited Nicol Allan’s work include: Hirschl & Adler, New York; Laure Genillard Gallery, London; Davis & Langdale Company, New York; the Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery (Betty Parsons), New York; The Arts Club of Chicago; Taranman, London; the Silvan Simone Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Cober Gallery, New York.

Nicol Allan’s work is included in such public collections as: the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Art Institute of Chicago, the Christopher Hewitt Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England; the De Beers Art Collection, London; the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; and the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

To order: Nicol Allan: Collages, edited by Rye Dag Holmboe, with a Foreword by Andrew Hunt (London: Slimvolume, 2021), go to www.slimvolume.org.

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