Looping and knotted bronze sculptures arranged beneath skylights at Perrotin Paris

What bronze remembers of the hand

Bronze usually announces its weight. In Alma Allen’s sculptures, it seems to have been caught while doing something else: turning back on itself, gathering into a knot, or folding over a surface that has not quite settled. At Perrotin in Paris, the distance between these substantial objects and the small gestures that began them is what gives the exhibition its tension. The metal has hardened, but the sense of handling remains.

Allen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery runs from 17 October to 19 December 2026. Freestanding sculptures occupy the bright rooms alongside wall reliefs whose creases, ridges and irregular edges bring a different scale of encounter. Across both, forms remain suggestive without resolving into a single recognisable thing.

Upright bronze sculpture framing a view into Alma Allen’s exhibition at Perrotin Paris — View of Alma Allen’s exhibition at Perrotin Paris, 2026. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Before the bronze

Each work begins at a size the artist can hold. String, clay and wax are worked between his fingers until a form acquires its own balance, rather than being made to follow a drawing fixed in advance. The models are then scanned, enlarged and cast in bronze at his home foundry. This passage through digital reproduction and casting carries an intimate act into a scale that can stand beside, or tower over, a viewer.

In the exhibition essay, Matthew McLean quotes Allen’s wish “to have my hands teach me something”. The phrase describes a process in which making is also a way of finding out. At their final scale, the sculptures retain the impression of pressure and adjustment: a section narrows where another swells, a length doubles back, and a loop opens a pocket of air inside an otherwise dense mass.

Dark crescent-shaped element above a polished bronze base in Alma Allen’s exhibition — View of Alma Allen’s exhibition at Perrotin Paris, 2026. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Holding fast

The coiled works have an affinity with ropes and knots, an association that grows out of Allen’s experience of sailing. McLean recounts that the artist developed many of the pieces after time in Venice, and worked on several aboard his boat, carrying the small models in a suitcase. Water and the handling of rope enter the work through remembered movement, without requiring the sculptures to become illustrations of a voyage.

Their curves suggest things that might yield under tension, yet the bronze holds them in place. In the gallery, the space around a loop becomes as noticeable as the metal itself. The eye follows a continuous line and then meets a thickened junction, a return or a sudden change of direction. McLean reads an idea of endurance in these tangles: their apparent strain also carries the possibility of holding on.

Folded bronze wall reliefs flanking a doorway with an upright sculpture beyond — View of Alma Allen’s exhibition at Perrotin Paris, 2026. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

A surface that keeps something back

The wall reliefs bring the gestures closer to a surface. Some spread out in ridged sheets, while others turn inward, partly concealing themselves. Their polished faces catch light unevenly, allowing a shallow fold to register as a dark seam beside a bright, rounded edge. The sensation of a pliable material survives in an object that can no longer be kneaded or pulled.

Alma Allen’s Not Yet Titled from 2022, a broad bronze relief with rippling horizontal ridges — Alma Allen, *Not Yet Titled*, 2022. Bronze, 196.2 × 192.4 × 17.8 cm. Photo: Dan Finlayson. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

In Not Yet Titled (2022), the broad, rippling bronze relief extends across 196.2 × 192.4 centimetres, with a depth of just 17.8 centimetres. Its reach across the wall is considerable, but the accumulated ridges draw attention into the shallow space of its surface. The image remains open to several readings, with no single outline settling the question of what it resembles.

Visitor facing bronze wall reliefs in the bright Perrotin gallery — View of Alma Allen’s exhibition at Perrotin Paris, 2026. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

For Allen, withholding an explanation is part of the work. In McLean’s account, the artist compares two folded reliefs to a diary or letter closed against a reader. His early encounters with Native American petroglyphs in Utah also inform this sense of an object carrying a presence beyond what can be known about its maker. The sculpture offers evidence of an action while leaving something of that action private.

Wall reliefs and an upright pleated sculpture across adjoining exhibition rooms — View of Alma Allen’s exhibition at Perrotin Paris, 2026. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Every work in the exhibition is called Not Yet Titled. The provisional wording matters: it leaves room for an understanding that has not arrived. Allen also intends the polished patinas to deepen over time, so that even after casting, the surface continues to change. What appears finished in bronze can still hold the uncertainty of the first model, when the hands were working towards a form they did not yet know.

The exhibition is on view at Perrotin Paris, 10 impasse Saint-Claude, until 19 December 2026. Opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm.

Project Credits

Exhibition: Alma Allen
Artist: Alma Allen / @almaallen
Gallery: Perrotin / @perrotin
Location: 10 impasse Saint-Claude, 75003 Paris, France
Dates: 17 October–19 December 2026
Material: Bronze
Exhibition photography, including cover: Tanguy Beurdeley
Artwork photography: Dan Finlayson