447 Space is pleased to announce Groundcovered (A Survey), an exhibition by the painter, horticulturist, and writer Rebecca Allan (b. 1962). Marking a life in painting spanning thirty years, the exhibition features paintings and works on paper from 1996 to the present. Drawing upon the singular preoccupations of her life—horticulture, land conservation, and art history—the selection is organized around places the artist has lived or visited, from Western New York to the Atlantic Northeast, the Pacific Northwest to Southeastern Kentucky, and Lebanon to Norway. Each place is reimagined and realized in Allan's gestural, chromatically nuanced paintings which she refers to as “cosmological landscapes... like the worlds encapsulated in Pieter Bruegel's sextet of the seasons.”

In Curtain and Thunderstorm (Vinalhaven, Maine), 2025, a lightning bolt splits Seal Bay harbor, where the artist taught drawing to composers at a music festival for several summers. Voltaire's Garden (Love Letter to Lebanon), 2015, references the embroidered textiles and tables filled with gorgeous foods along The Corniche that Allan experienced during a visiting artist residency at Lebanese American University in Beirut. Infant Stream (Wappingers Creek), 2009, projects us into deep woods where a river originates with a trickle of water burbling up. Issima, 2025, takes us under the shade cloth of a specialty plant nursery in Rhode Island where fragile new cultivars are propagated. A wormwood plant (Artemesia absinthium) appears in Absinthe, 1996, an homage to Edgar Degas' Absinthe Drinker, a painting that epitomizes the isolation of despair. Burn Pile, 2023, one of several works that address fire in the landscape, is inspired by the Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup. In Crow and Sound, 2025, Winslow Homer's bird from The Fox Hunt hovers over an inferno in Puget Sound.

Underlying these place-paintings is a throughline of horticultural research and practice. As the artist states, her work is driven by “a desire to nurture the world by envisioning and then enacting spaces where beauty is reclaimed.” Working in a bright studio repurposed from a Depression-era concrete stucco garage, Allan employs a translucent, warm color vocabulary, and a larger scale, following a recent move to Mount Vernon, just north of The Bronx, her home for the past twenty years. The upheaval of relocation, accompanied by the death of the artist's father last year, have required new ways of integrating loss and rekindling purpose.

Two exhibition related talks, with the artist in conversation with Holly Hughes, Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Thomas Collins, Executive Director and President of The Barnes Foundation will take place (dates to be announced).

About the Artist

Exhibiting in the United States and abroad for over 30 years, Rebecca Allan has been represented in over 40 solo and 25 group exhibitions. Her work was recently acquired for the permanent collections of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY and the United States Embassy in Olso, Norway. Allan's most recent solo exhibitions were presented at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Raft of Sanity and Anna Kaplan Contemporary (Buffalo, NY), David Richard Gallery (New York/Santa Fe), Rockefeller Brothers Fund Headquarters, Gallery 2/20, and Meredith Ward Fine Art (New York).  

Allan earned an MFA in painting from Kent State University and BA from Allegheny College. She is certified in horticulture/sustainable garden design by the New York Botanical Garden and established her own garden design firm, Painterly Gardens, in 2018.

Since 1993, Allan has been awarded artist’s residencies at: Monson Arts in Maine; The Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars in Provincetown, MA; The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; The Burchfield Penney Art Center/University at Buffalo, NY; The Hermitage Artists Retreat, Englewood, FL; Centrum Foundation, Port Townsend, WA; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA; and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Temecula, CA.

In 2012, Allan became a principal collaborator of The Crossroads Project: Rising Tide, a performance piece that addresses climate change through the perspectives of environmental science, chamber music, and visual art.

Allan is also a contributing writer for publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Art & Antiques, Fine Art Connoisseur, hyperallergic.com, and artcritical.com. She has written on subjects including Fanny Sanín, Sean Scully, Judy Chicago, Marcia Marcus, Dorothea Rockburne, Louise Fishman, Robert Berlind, Charles Burchfield, Miriam Shapiro, Ruth Asawa, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Allan has taught at several colleges and universities including Pratt Institute, Marymount Manhattan College, The College of Mount Saint Vincent, Cornish College of the Arts, and Allegheny College. From 1997-99 she was a teaching artist with the Washington State Arts Commission.