edited by Emma Dean, Michael Stanley

essay by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith

Published to coincide with Phillip Allen’s solo exhibition at the Milton Keynes Gallery this catalogue brings together a selection of work from over a five year period. Allen is an original and distinguished voice in contemporary British art. He is known for his distinctive paintings, in which the top and bottom edges are encrusted with a thick, globular application of paint.

Allen’s practice both engages and rebuffs the formal ideals of modernism, bringing together ‘painting as a process’ with a warm embrace of illusionism. His business is the ‘business of painting’ and throughout, and his enigmatic work, beautiful and ugly, abstract and illusionistic, modest and profound, asks as many questions as it answers.