Monday, May 12, 6PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Penthouse Room 901
You are invited to join us at the Logan Center for the Arts on Monday, May 12 at 6pm for our final OPC talk of the year with visiting artist Allison Katz.
Internationally renowned for her cerebral approach to painting, Montreal-born, UK-based artist Allison Katz transforms everyday objects and spaces into enticing visual allusions. Defying traditional painterly categories, her images blur realism with the fantastic, incorporating wordplay and literary, historical and autobiographic details to upend viewers’ expectations. In 2022 Katz presented a much-celebrated series of new works at the 59th Venice Biennale and in 2024, Katz was both artist and curator of an expansive group exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum. At this talk, Katz will share her exploration of poetic categories of painting and how they are derived from the world itself as much as from the process in the studio. She will reflect on what it means for an artist to curate, especially using her own painting as the imperative and impetus, working and thinking about painting as a young form that started 45,000 years ago.
Allison Katz was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1980 and currently lives and works in London, England. She studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and received her MFA from Columbia University in New York. Katz’s work investigates the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, information systems, graphic icons and art history. Her diverse imagery, including roosters, cabbages, mouths, fairies and noses, appears as recurring signs that build a constellation of ideas and references, which transmute across the mediums of painting, posters, ceramics, and installations.
Katz received widespread critical recognition for her first traveling UK solo exhibition Artery at Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Camden Art Centre (2022). The exhibition was accompanied by the richly illustrated publication Artery, which situates itself somewhere between a monograph, an exhibition catalogue, and an artist’s book. Other recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA (2023); the MIT List Center for the Arts, Cambridge, MA (2018); Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada (2018); and Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2015).
Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts