Douglas Allsop

Born in London, United Kingdom, 1943

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Douglas Allsop’s works present a site specificity that is architectural. They are neither abstract nor illusory but reflective. They capture an inverted mirror world that changes with our perception. They question the way we look at them and what we want to see. Douglas Allsop does not create images but his works do. Using reflective materials they mirror the rooms they are in, the views through windows, and the people looking at them. But these are elusive, ghostly images, caught on a screen of video-tape spanning the room, or registering on a perforated surface so that the 'frame' becomes a moving picture. Allsop explores our processes of perception and plays with our quest for stability and meaning.

Biography

Douglas Allsop was born in London in 1943 and lives and works in Berlin. He studied at St Albans School of Art from 1960 to 1964, followed by a Postgraduate Arts Council Digswell Scholarship and a Digswell Fellowship at Digswell House Arts Community, Hertfordshire, held from 1965 to 1975. He received the Unilever Art Prize in 1965.

Allsop has held teaching positions at the Royal College of Art, London, and at Byam Shaw School of Art, where he served as Director of Studies from 1995 to 2006 and subsequently as Professor of Fine Art at the University of the Arts London from 2006 to 2010, when he was appointed Professor Emeritus.

His work has been exhibited widely across Europe and beyond, with solo presentations at institutions including Southampton City Art Gallery, Kettles Yard at the University of Cambridge, Museum Wilhelm Morgner in Soest, Städtische Galerie Villa Zanders in Bergisch Gladbach, Stiftung für konkrete Kunst in Reutlingen, and Museum Pontoise. He has exhibited with Bartha Contemporary on multiple occasions. His work is represented in the collections of the Musée de Cambrai and the Sammlung Schroth, among others.