Aesthetically Pleasing
McAllister isn’t exactly an outsider. Born in Louisiana in 1973, he got his MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., in 2007, studying under the superstar artist Mike Kelly, alongside future art-world darlings including Sterling Ruby and Aaron Curry.

But while those artists were all making, to varying degrees, what could be considered conceptual art, McAllister was making paintings. Pretty paintings.

“Just the optimism of the work, in light of the deeply ironic art that was coming out at the time,” says Fuentes. “It made a lot of the other stuff, even work I love, just feel so heavy.”

Initially, McAllister painted wildfires (an unpleasantly precocious, if currently topical subject matter) and made work on a massive scale. After discovering that his art was both prohibitively expensive both to ship and to sell, McAllister scaled down his paintings— which in 2008 were selling for about $7,000— and made smaller, more salable works, turning his attention to landscapes and paintings within paintings.

McAllister met Fuentes shortly after graduating and began to show with him in 2008. After a sold-out show at Fuentes’s gallery in 2009, where paintings were priced at $2,500, McAllister was the subject of a flurry of press and enthusiasm. “We sent out an email with an image [of McAllister’s paintings], and it was the first time since I opened the gallery where the phone was ringing off the hook,” says Fuentes. “We placed every work before the opening of the show.”

Other Galleries Catch On
Soon after, other galleries began to approach Fuentes about representing McAllister in other regions. In 2013, McAllister had solo shows at the Richard Telles gallery in Los Angeles, the Carl Freedman Gallery in London, and the Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. “The first show we did was really great,” says Diament, of the London gallery. “We had six small canvases, and they sold out immediately. It wasn’t because he had a big name, it was because people connected with the work.”

The next year he had another solo show in London and one in New York; in 2015 he had yet another solo show in New York and branched out to Hagiwara Projects, a gallery in Tokyo. In 2016 he had solo shows in Brussels and Berlin, while this year he had yet another show in London.

Supply and Demand
Despite all that, there isn’t the typical market frenzy surrounding McAllister’s work that would lead most collectors to fear they’re buying into a bubble.

His art sells for about $20,000 for a small painting, $30,000 for a midsize work, and $70,000 for a massive piece. Despite the sold-out shows of yore, his art has never once sold at auction, and his collectors rarely ask Fuentes to resell their works. “All the resales, for the most part, have come back to me,” Fuentes says. “And we’ve done a total of 10 or so over the last 10 years. People aren’t really letting them go.” Currently, he says, there are works available for purchase, which means supply is meeting though not eclipsing demand.

“We don’t want to push his prices to a crazy place,” he says. “Once you inch past $75,000 and get to $100,000, it seems like it’s pushing it.