Allan J. Graham

1943, San Francisco, California - 2019 Albuquerque, New Mexico

BiographyA painter is a person entirely involved in a two-dimensional surface. He feels it; he loves it; he is sensitive to everything that happens on it. If a person is a painter, it doesn't matter what he paints, for the two-dimensional surface is the language he speaks.

Allan Graham, 1979

I'm not comfortable with the ideas of reductionism or minimalism. I'd rather be a maximalist and have everything possible, keep the field open, exclude nothing. Any idea you have is going to limit your view; it's like you can't see past it…[the viewer is] caught between describing [a work of art] and not describing it, put into a situation where you have to find your own relationship [to it].

Allan Graham, 1994
Excerpt from an interview with Kathleen Shields

Allan Graham was born in San Francisco. He attended summer workshops in art at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Jose State University. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of New Mexico, subsequently learned lithography, and from 1974 to 1978 operated the Motel Gallery in downtown Albuquerque. Graham's work has been exhibited in numerous one-person and group shows, including exhibitions in Canada and Scotland. In New Mexico, Graham's work is represented in the permanent collections of the Roswell Museum and Art Center; the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe; the University of New Mexico Art Museum; and the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History.

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