Allan McCollum

Overview

Whatever specific meaning the artist puts into a work, it will always retain its promise as a gift, its destiny as a keepsake. This is the artwork I am interested in making: an object filled with the absence of certain meaning, and yet rich with the quality of meaningfulness in and of itself.

In his sculptures, drawings, and photographs, Allan McCollum applies the strategies of typologies and mass production to handmade objects, creating vast installations of small-scale works.

Biography

It's fascinating and touching that people work so hard to build an imminent meaning into things; that they pursue their desire to produce symbolic objects for themselves to keep, and to exchange with others. In our culture, an artwork is an object of this kind; and whatever specific meaning the artist works to put into it, it will always retain its promise as a gift, its destiny as a keepsake.

Allan McCollum was born 1944, in Los Angeles, California. He creates sculptures exploring the correlation between the individuality of an object as well as its derivation from mass production, reflecting on today’s society. Inspired by the Fluxus movement and artworks by conceptual artists, such as Sol LeWitt and Daniel Buren, Allan McCollum introduced an artistic process of studio manufacture of sculptural objects made in unlimited editions. He is creating a seemingly infinite number of objects, indiscernible from one another, displayed on walls or laid out on tables. Using the multiple as a point of departure, McCollum questions the impact of...

Allan McCollum was born 1944, in Los Angeles, California. He creates sculptures exploring the correlation between the individuality of an object as well as its derivation from mass production, reflecting on today’s society.

Inspired by the Fluxus movement and artworks by conceptual artists, such as Sol LeWitt and Daniel Buren, Allan McCollum introduced an artistic process of studio manufacture of sculptural objects made in unlimited editions. He is creating a seemingly infinite number of objects, indiscernible from one another, displayed on walls or laid out on tables. Using the multiple as a point of departure, McCollum questions the impact of the infinite multiple on the viewer. McCollum’s repetition is also in a way inquiring what defines an art object, commenting on the journey of an object from object to icon to symbol.

In the late seventies he became especially well known for his Surrogate Paintings, with which he examines what it means to be a working contemporary artist and considers the role of seriality in contemporary art-making. To produce this work, the artist and his assistants engage in repetitive and communal labor that systematizes and brakes down the artistic process into stages of production: the creation of molds, the casting of plaster, and the application of enamel paint to create a smooth surface with no trace of the artist’s hand. None of the panels share the same dimensions and frame color. Handmade but standardized, they integrate art and mass production, challenging conventional distinctions between these types of labor.

Allan McCollum has been the subject of over 100 solo exhibitions at institutions, and his works are part of important museum collections around the world such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has produced numerous public art projects in the United States and Europe.

He lives and works in New York City.

Works