Stuart Allen: Seeing Color
March 28 – May 30, 2026
Artist Reception: Saturday, March 28, 2026
from 2:00 – 5:00 PM
For Immediate Release, Denton, Texas
This spring PDNB Gallery will host a solo exhibition for Stuart Allen, a Texas/New Mexico based artist (b. 1970, Wichita, Kansas). This will be his third solo exhibition at PDNB Gallery.
His show will feature new work that includes watercolors, Watercolor Pixels, and a series titled, Flights. The Flights series features images photographed from an airplane window about 35,000 miles high. The snapshots taken are transformed into a dot pattern created with an algorithm to align grids of small dots like a half-tone pattern, but different since the color values are retained. The resulting image is a record of atmospheric light. All are titled with the airline flight number, time and place.
Another new series, Every Unique Color, explores all the unique colors from a snapshot of food. The artist reorganizes via X and Y coordinates all the unique colors by their color hue, horizontally, and by their lightness, vertically. The resulting image reveals a phenomenal composition of color.
Additional works will be included from earlier work, a sort of mini retrospective. His pixel series, the first body of work that PDNB Gallery exhibited in 2006, shows the beginnings of Stuart Allen’s curiosity about the science of color. A simple snapshot is mined for pixel combinations that, when blown up in size, create a large square with slight variations of color. In essence, like magnifying a small cell to view its biological properties. A digital image is made up of square pixels, each one a different color.
In 2016 PDNB featured Stuart Allen’s Soap Bubble series, also dealing with the color. Large soap bubbles are blown in a clouded sky offering the best light possible to demonstrate the uncanny revelation that soap can reveal in white light. Wavelengths are amplified creating color on the skin of the bubble that the naked eye does not see.
Stuart Allen has always infused science and engineering into his public art creations and his photography. Though the photographs are conceptual, they are rather basic constructions, with some help of the computer, of light and color exploration. Playfulness is certainly a part of the work, often reaching a large audience despite its conceptual genre.
Stuart received his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions and public commissions throughout the United States since 1992. He has recently been awarded the Texas Society of Architects Artisan Award. His artwork is in multiple corporate and museum collections including the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas; San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas; The Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio.
The artist will attend the opening reception on March 28th.