Twelve Around One is pleased to present Steven Allan’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition, curated by Nick Jensen and Gabor Gyory features paintings and drawings from a body of work completed in 2010.

Steven Allan’s paintings have a quality of a failed Romanticism. The long appreciated Romantic motif of the figure alone in the landscape is altered and subverted. Instead of the sublime image of man untroubled by the landscape we have a picture of a man who appears to have all the freedom within the landscape and yet is constrained in his freedom by the desolation which lies before him. He appears untroubled, except by trouble itself. 

The landscape, in Allan’s paintings are oblivious to the figures plight and whilst their desolation is not instantly threatening they certainly remove all possible hope for redemption.

As an artist, Allen’s work represents a yearning and a desire for new terrain within painting.  He combines a sardonic wit, transforming inanimate objects such as bottles, cans, teabags, carrots, worms and tubes of paint into carnivalesque characters and scenarios with human qualities. Human or otherwise these objects and containers relate to consumption and the detritus of a debauched existence.

The title, ‘There Are Two In The Room’ is in part an ironic play on the loneliness within the work, possibly making reference to relationship between artist and subject, the painting and the audience and in turn, between the various works in the show.