Terry Allen’s complex, polymathic body of work sprawls across a multitude of artistic modes including drawing, painting, video, sculpture, writing, and music. Continually shapeshifting, accumulating, and turning back and in on itself, his work has been described as fragmented and chaotic, an oeuvre that does not attempt to distill a single theme to an easily graspable essence, but rather mimics the sensory overload of real life. “I’ve never thought in terms of terminology,” Allen says. “I’ve been called every kind of artist I can think of, and I don’t relate to any of them.”
In Extinct, on view now in L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years, Allen continues this proliferative approach to artmaking, building up a trove of macabre, poetic details to contend with what is missing or has been lost. Combining stream-of-consciousness textual fragments with smoky assemblage drawings, Allen recounts dreamlike, often violent, childhood experiences and the animals they connect to, the experiences and animals both now faded to extinction. An extension of Allen’s multipart body of work MemWars, in which the artist explores episodes of his own life, Extinct confronts the persistent—if fragmentary—nature of our often disturbingly cruel formative recollections, pairing them with the vanished casualties these experiences may leave in their wake.
Featured in eight L.A. Louver solo presentations since 1983—including the critically-acclaimed Terry Allen: The Exact Moment It Happens in the West (2019)—Terry Allen continues to be one of the gallery’s most compelling and enigmatic interdisciplinary artists. His work has been collected by several major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. As an outlaw country musician and songwriter, Allen has worked with other creative polymaths, including David Byrne, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Guy Clark, Ryan Bingham, and many others. Above all, Allen is a storyteller, and across the multitude, his voice remains constant and in perpetual motion. “I think that’s what art does,” Allen says. “It takes you into these weird circles back into yourself, but all different, and it also takes you places you never in a million years thought you’d ever go."
