Allegra Hicks

Baert Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Allegra Hicks. This will be the artist’s first presentation at the gallery.

Here we encounter paintings on linen, an embroidered anatomical heart, a yonic composition in colored glass.

These works choreograph an utterance, an iterative and urgent push through silences. A language is cultivated of exhaled morphemes of color. A grammar is built of shapes: a woman’s discovery of herself, her body, her ability to generate expression and life. A viewer finds an interface: looking in, you brush up against an interstellar space, through which a vibrance pushes from its own world.

The inner place of these works moves outward through geometries: scaffolds and containing frames. Deep mauves, blues, rich multi-toned blacks, pinks and lucid yellows.

With the penetrative and expansive momentum of breath, pressing forward and outward like a saxophone’s mouth, making a pulse pathway scattering or melting internal forms. Sometimes geometric shapes are poised, meticulously balanced, as if for target practice.

We find architectural gestures crossing these works: a traversing through-line repeated, like a tuned string, or soft triangles spreading through a set of paintings arranged together. This is the cool sensuality of a poetics of touch, diffusing across balanced designs and blossoming chromatics put into motion.

Poet and essayist Andrea Applebee

Allegra Hicks studied Art and Design at the Politecnico di Design in Milan and the Ecole de Peinture in Brussels. While in New York, she became the assistant of artist Donald Baechler. She is an acclaimed designer and has written on the subject in her book, “An Eye for Design” (Abrams Press, 2010). She lives and works in London and Naples. The exhibition contains 18 painted and embroidered works on linen, a carpet and a glass sculpture.