ALLAN McCOLLUM
Los Angeles, 1944

The California stage of this self-taught artist’s development offered a powerful pictorial content, but one that was close to the Minimal and Conceptual work of the late sixties. In his first exhibition, at the Jack Glenn Gallery in Corona del Mar, 1971, he presented the series Bleach Painting and Constructed Painting, the former based on chemical manipulation of pigment and the latter made by juxtaposing small rectangular pieces in accordance with a mathematical pattern and arranging them directly on the wall. In 1972 he was included in the group exhibition Los Angeles ’72, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, to which he had moved in 1975.
In 1979 he exhibited his first Surrogate Paintings at the Julian Pretto and Co. Gallery in New York. He had begun the series the previous year, and with it he embarked on a personal interpretation of the art object in its multiple dimension as an exhibition piece, object of desire, cultural item, status symbol or decorative element. After concentrating on painting and other media and two-dimensional supports (photographs, films) in the series Plaster Surrogates, Surrogates on Location (Location Photos) and Perpetual Photos, all begun in 1982 and presented the following year in New York, at the Marian Goodman Gallery, and Kansas City, at the Douglas Drake Gallery, in 1985 he transferred his ideas to three-dimensional objects with the series Perfect Vehicles, having already experimented with them in his collaborations with the photographer Louise Lawler in 1983, in Ideal Settings. Although latent in all these pieces, his contributions to the debate about the concept of an original work of art or copy and the artistic value of the systems of mass production and reproduction provided the focus for the series Individual Works and Drawings, both of 1987. In the late eighties he began to make an impact internationally, with various general exhibitions of his work, in Frankfurt and Amsterdam in 1988, Eindhoven, London and Valencia in 1990. During the nineties his attention and his exploration of copies and originals focused on other disciplines and categories, such as archaeology, in The Dog of Pompeii, 1990, or natural history, in Lost Objects, 1991, and Natural Copies, 1994. In 1997 he made The Event: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida, which aimed to reproduce forms obtained from natural processes.