Allan Graham

Allan Graham (born 1943 in San Francisco) is an American artist based in New Mexico, whose work spans sculpture, painting, poetry and video. He studied in San Francisco and Albuquerque, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1967.

His early paintings were wall-like grids that, in the mid to late 1970s, opened into looser compositions with sweeping arcs and herringbone patterns. In 1983 he gave up conventionally shaped canvases and began leaving the stretcher bars exposed. By the mid-1980s his work had become hybrids of painting and sculpture made from wood, canvas, newspaper and book pages. These were followed by near-monochromes on bent canvases and irregularly circular paintings built from book pages, including a Navajo Bible and Dante's Inferno.

In the 1990s he painted the "Cave of Generation" series, with steps leading to large monochrome and two-tone paintings, and then "Pre-hung (for those who suffer form)", a set of doors painted with a palette knife. From 1990 some of his work appeared under the pseudonym Toadhouse, named after an underground structure he built with his son in Albuquerque that attracted toads. These works are word based, including bumper stickers with haiku-like slogans and tiny graphite words in his cosmological and UFO series. His influences include Zen Buddhism, as seen in the installation Time is Memory, and his work is held by collections such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.