Alma Allen Signs With Perrotin and Mendes Wood DM Ahead of U.S. Venice Biennale Pavilion
As preparations accelerate for the next Venice Biennale, American artist Alma Allen has secured new gallery representation with Perrotin and Mendes Wood DM, a move that arrives amid unusually candid remarks about the pressures surrounding a national pavilion.
In an interview with The New York Times, Allen said that two galleries previously representing him ended their relationships after he accepted the commission to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. The artist framed the split as a direct response to the Biennale appointment, a high-profile platform that can reshape an artist’s market and institutional trajectory.
Allen also addressed a recurring question that shadows the U.S. Pavilion: how funding intersects with artistic autonomy. While noting that part of the pavilion’s financing comes from the U.S. government, he told The New York Times that he has retained full artistic control over the presentation.
For Venice, Allen plans to show “seven or eight” new works alongside earlier sculptures, according to the same interview. The mix suggests a presentation designed to read both as a fresh body of work and as a longer arc, allowing viewers to track the evolution of his sculptural language rather than encounter it as a single, isolated statement.
Perrotin’s involvement, meanwhile, appears to have been set in motion before the Biennale announcement. In a separate report cited by The New York Times, Allen said conversations with Emmanuel Perrotin, the French gallery owner, began prior to the invitation to represent the United States. The pair reportedly met in late October.
Perrotin has said the gallery will provide financial and operational support in Venice, a practical contribution that can be decisive for an undertaking of this scale, where fabrication, shipping, installation, and on-the-ground logistics often rival the conceptual demands of the work itself.
The dual representation by Perrotin and Mendes Wood DM places Allen within two internationally active programs with strong footholds across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. It also underscores how quickly the ecosystem around a Biennale pavilion can shift: the commission can open doors, but it can also expose fault lines in the expectations galleries, institutions, and artists bring to a project that is both cultural diplomacy and contemporary exhibition-making.
With Allen insisting on autonomy despite public funding, and with new gallery partners stepping in to support the Venice effort, attention now turns to how the artist will balance the weight of national representation with the quieter, slower time of sculpture — and what it will mean to stage that work in the Biennale’s most symbolically charged setting.
