Richard Allen, 1933-1999

Sotheby's are delighted to present eight works for sale from the studio of Richard Allen. The group offers an exceptional opportunity to experience a varied selection of his work which spans four decades and provides a rare chance to acquire works by an artist who has never appeared at auction before.

From 1957 Richard Allen attended Bath Academy of Art under the tutelage of avant-garde artists including Howard Hodgkin and Adrian Heath. Always drawn towards the purity of abstraction, his interest in geometric forms was cemented by a period of study in Milan where he encountered the vertical repetition of building site hoardings. Inspired by the torn and fragmented posters attached to the hoardings, he created a series of collages, including lot 320.  With their mass-produced printed text, ready-made images and industrial colour, the collages play homage to Pop Art, yet are unique in their synthesis of Pop materials with abstract form.

During the 1960s, Allen's work developed into a more severe and pure form of abstraction. Exhibiting with Bridget Riley and John Hoyland among others, he developed a visual language reliant on the vertical painting format and the use of optical phenomena for content. The striking paintings of this date include Black Bloom (lot 322), where the dynamic composition executed in a strict monochrome palette echoes Riley’s engagement with similar ideas.

Colour was to re-enter Allen’s work after he was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to travel in India in 1966. The powerful painting, Pink and Green (lot 321) demonstrates Allen’s engagement with interferometry, where the specific patterning of colour and line created the illusion of undulation, movement and depth.  After a one-man show with Angela Flowers Gllery, Allen’s large scale works were included in the 1972 Arts Council-organised ‘Systems Exhibition’ at the Whitechapel Gllery, curated by Nicolas Serota.

Inspired by the 1975 Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Allen’s work became increasingly Minimalist and Fundamental. He rejected colour and worked primarily with charcoal and cellulose acetate on canvas, a preoccupation that was to span two decades. He built his landscapes through vertical and horizontal lines, constructing multi-layered grids with interlaced bars.  This system created works with a profound insistence on iconic cross imagery, as seen in lots 326 and 327. 

By 1974 Allen had established an international reputation with solo exhibitions around the world.  As well as being included in ‘British Painting ‘74’ at the Hayward Gallery and ‘British Painting 1952-1977’ at the Royal Academy, he was celebrated with a one man show at The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 1975. In the mid 1990s Allen returned to the use of colour and oil on canvas. He began working on what was to be his last body of work, ‘The White Paintings’ (lots 324, 325), where a range of different whites are combined with a strict linear application of colour, creating beautiful abstract meditations emphasising the interrelation between colour and form.  These paintings, alongside many other notable works from Allen’s career, were included in the artist’s retrospective exhibition at The University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1998.

Richard Allen died from Motor Neurone Disease in 1999.