May 12, 2025
Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago
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 biographical details to upend viewers’ expectations.
Her diverse imagery, including roosters, cabbages, mouths, fairies, and variations on her own name, appear as recurring symbols and icons which build an on-going constellation of ideas and references. Through this act of returning to, copying, transforming and reshaping motifs, the artist creates a lineage and continuity from one work to another, informing and connecting the totality with each new appearance. ‘I paint like I write, that is, I build around quotes, which is a conversation, in effect,’ says Katz. Her subjects are united by a curiosity for how an image passes through a viewer’s embodied experience, while its elasticity of meaning is shaped by impersonal, cultural conditions through time. In this way her work addresses the ambiguity of subjectivity and its presentation.
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, which she will speak ind-depthly about at today’s talk. She 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.
For almost two decades now, Katz has taken the canon of painting for a magical spin, from the act of making her own idiosyncratic paintings to thinking about the place of painting and exhibition, writing and creating graphics and monographs, as well as the role of curating her own work along with the works of others spanning thousands of years.