Allen Furbeck has been living and painting in NYC since 1977. His work 
has taken many forms, but the primary focus has been on abstraction. Themes 
that have twined through the process, or come back again and again, include 
transparency, layering, surface, color, and the kinds of experiences they 
create; how a work manifests itself as both an object and an image (an 
exploration of painting’s mind/body duality if you will); and a kind of 
complexity that leaves the work open and ongoing, and so introduces 
temporality as well as an immersion in experience, expression, and 
meaningfulness in their not-yet-resolved states. “There’s no definitive 
resolution to art and the choices it poses, and that makes it inexhaustible 
and also a terrific education in making decisions with limited information,” 
says the artist.

Furbeck has been working in recent years in acrylic paint on plexiglass. 
At first a compromise in order to reduce fumes while painting at home with a 
newborn son, painting with acrylic paints soon became a challenge to find a 
way of working that did not merely ape his oil paintings but was able to 
respond to the character of acrylic itself. Plastic is a particularly modern 
material, and while it is unlikely to elicit the kind of organic 
attractiveness that its flax derived cousins linseed oil and linen do, it has 
a kind of gaudy flashiness that can create challenging tensions with the more 
sedate traditions of fine art. The artist has characterized his work 
variously as kaleidoscopic, entwined, contrapuntal, site relational (as 
opposed to “site specific”) and as a balancing act between the exquisite and 
the vulgar.

In addition to acrylic and plexiglass, the artist also embeds a number of 
collage elements in the work. The recent paintings usually include a 
reflective metallic paper often found in lighting and plastic stores, and 
which echoes his use of metallic and interference colors. He has also used 
such various items as screws, nails, pencil shavings, beads and buttons, 
rocks, sand, and broken bits of plexi. A favorite material that is used in 
many pieces is bits of First Avenue, chipped off a large piece obtained from 
repaving refuse and donated by the work crew doing the repaving.