Collection: Moya Allen

@moyaallen_

Moya Allen’s (b. 1996, Eora/Sydney) practice is based predominantly in painting, using colour and form as a tool to activate space and memory. Her process is driven by the desire to create an experience through colour, to seek balance within imbalance and to challenge expectations of a painting’s formal qualities. Colour is the central element of Allen’s practice, exploring its optical reactions to light and space, in addition to colour’s place within Western artistic tradition and collective thought.

Moya Allen’s current series of acrylic paintings are characterised by de-centered compositions of subtly warped rectangles and squares in contrasting shades of red and pink. The works abandon the tradition of the canvas stretcher, enabling for experimentation with materiality and form. The colour palette of red and pink serves as a reaction to the book Chromophobia by artist and writer David Batchelor, who argues that Western society holds fear and prejudice against colour, associating it with otherness, superficiality and chaos. Allen regards red and pink as two of the most hijacked colours in Western culture, using them to embody a rejection of chromophobic impulses. These works draw from Moya Allen’s personal histories of domestic objects and textiles, linking the past and present to reflect on the power that colour holds within our external and internal realities.