Tommy Angel #8 (2006) / Tommy Angel #10 (2006)

Jonathan Allen (b.1966) is a London-based visual artist, working in a variety of media including lenticular photography, video installation, performance, and object/textworks. He has been exhibiting widely in the UK, Europe, and the USA since 1991. His performance alter-ego Tommy Angel, a unredeemed and unredeeming 'gospel magician', has been scandalising pulpits and evangelising cabaret audiences since 2002. Described as 'Billy Graham meeting David Copperfield via Donald Rumsfeld' Tommy Angel extends the artist's ongoing exploration of performance magic's wider cultural resonance, highlighting the ambivalent power of illusion and its role in assembling our sense of the real.

Magic Shop (2002) neon

Recent exhibitions include Mesmer at temporarycontemporary, Non-Human at David Risley Gallery, and So You're Afraid Of What? at Redux Gallery, London, and Variety at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, UK (2005). Jonathan Allen is represented by David Risley Gallery London, where he has had solo shows in Feb 2006, and Nov 2007.

Tommy Angel has performed recently for the opening of the Hayward Gallery's Eyes, Lies and Illusions, ZOO Art Fair, and for Duckie, with whom he performed in 2006 at Tate Britain, London. Jonathan's work was exhibited in the first Singapore Biennale Sept-Nov 2006. He has recently guest-edited Issue 26 of New-York-based art and culture quarterly Cabinet.

His recent solo exhibition KALANAG at David Risley Gallery explores conjuring's interstice with fascism through an exploration of the work of German magician Helmut Schreiber, Adolf Hitler's notorious 'minister of magic'.

Jonathan Allen is currently the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow 2007-2008 University of Oxford and the British School at Rome

Tank Museum from Second Truths (1998)