Longtime friends – both from Sydney, Australia – the curator Joseph Allen Shea & artist Mel O’Callaghan founded Galerie Allen in 2013. The gallery grew out of a pop-up, site-specific exhibition in Paris (where Mel had been based for years), following which the duo decided to turn the space, and their collaboration, into a permanent commercial platform to support the “ethical presentation, promotion and production of contemporary art”. With the gallery today a fixture on the local art scene, and at Paris’s annual contemporary art fair FIAC too, their bold moves never fail to make waves.
