Allison Nill, born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri is a contemporary artist who uses painting and sculpture as her primary mediums. Allison’s body of work is a collection of objects relating to the colors and forms of the body and elements found in the natural world.
Nill takes on a different approach to portraiture and what it means for a work art to be classified as a portrait. The viewer is transported back home, to nature, and is invited to view specimens and snapshots of the natural world to aid in understanding one’s own personal identity.
Allison presents works from a sculptural painting practice that engenders hybrid compositions, embracing the subjective touch of the artist’s hand and the inextricable link between process, material, and form.
Simultaneously seductive and grotesque, Nill’s work is the result of a fluid and organic working process in which difficult to control materials help determine the final outcome. As with her other work, color becomes an equally important component. Nill’s colors-pinks and mauves, earthy greens, ochres, gray-blues, and flesh like taupe-are oozed, dripped, brushed and poured on, coalescing in some areas and avoiding others, providing texture and variability to the already tactile, untreated surface of the material.
Nill’s painterly application of material re-contextualizes her forms, as if they were not sculptural, but paintings in three-dimensional, physical space. Ambiguity and transformation remain at the core of her practice.
Allison Nill resides in Los Angeles California. Nill has studied at Slade School of Fine Art, The University of Washington, and Otis College of Art and Design. Nill has shown her work all over the world in group and solo exhibitions, and has participated in a number of residencies and intensives.