Intimate Terms

STANCE Gallery is pleased to present Intimate Terms, the Swedish debut of Los Angeles–based artist Theodora Allen. Over the past decade, Allen has developed a distinct visual lexicon, deeply attuned to the symbolic power of images and their archetypal cycles of return, transformation, and persistence. The works in Intimate Terms present a suite of recent paintings that reflect the artist’s sustained engagement with a process-based method of painting that has developed into a defining and generative part of her painting practice—a strategy for merging image and surface, subject and action. At the core of each painting on view is an object or life form caught in a state of transformation, either undergoing change or suspended in the act of becoming. Representations of forms associated with impenetrability—classical armor, stone walls, metal barriers—are rendered with unexpected softness and translucency. These symbols of defense give way to signs of nascent renewal: germinating seeds, recently emerged butterflies, and the ideogram of a heart. Each painting carries an oracular charge, revealing shared emotional truths while resonating with the ecological and social urgencies of our time. Working on gessoed linen, Allen builds her compositions through layered application and removal of oil paint, often in a restrained palette of jewel-toned blues and cool grays. This labor-intensive process of accumulation, sedimentation, and subtraction, shapes light and shadow through acts of erasure and retention, preserving areas of luminosity, while dimming others. The result is a shimmering, porous threshold between the physical and the felt, the visible and the imagined.