Camden Art Centre Presents Allison Katz: Artery

Allison Katz’s (b. 1980, Montreal, Canada) exhibition at Camden Art Centre will be the London-based artist’s first institutional solo show in London.

For more than a decade, Katz has been exploring painting’s relationship to questions of identity and expression, selfhood and voice. Animated by a restless sense of humor and curiosity, her works articulate a tricksy language of recurring forms—roosters, monkeys, and cabbages, among other things – that are by turns familiar and enigmatic, and through which the artist’s sustained and critical pursuit of “genuine ambiguity” takes shape. The work for Artery was developed over the last two years, in parallel with the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. The new paintings, posters, and exhibition design are infused with questions of communication and connection, distancing, and intimacy.

For Katz, “Artery” is a resonant and loaded title: she says: “I want to emphasize the non-order of things, from inside to out”. As such, the exhibition is preoccupied by the concept of networks and channels, by the spaces between inside and outside, experience and image; and by painting’s traditional relationship to the haptic, that is, to not-touching.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, where it was shown in its first iteration in 2021, and it responds to the particularities of the gallery spaces of both venues, treating the buildings as porous bodies: organisms that extend both above and below, inside and out. In Nottingham, the exhibition burrowed underground to a network of subterranean caves beneath the gallery building. At Camden Art Centre, it will be reimagined for the specificities of the galleries, expanded with a substantial new body of paintings, and includes an off-site presentation at the Canadian High Commission on Trafalgar Square. Here, in the gallery at Canada House, Katz sets up an abundant installation drawn from her extensive archive of announcement posters that she has been creating in relation to her exhibitions for over a decade. Works in their own right, the same references that appear in Katz’s paintings spill off and into the posters, circulating in and feeding-back from the network and sensibility of advertising and graphic design. The construction of images as posters operates within an expanded practice as a way of playfully approaching protocols and procedures of typography, language, and graphics.

Across all of these sites, Katz’s autofiction unfolds through a series of biographical anecdotes and moments of synchronicity or coincidence. Drawing from her family history, including the meeting place of her maternal grandparents in Nottingham, and the coincidental address of Katz’s childhood home on Finchley Road, Hampstead, Quebec, (shared with Camden Art Centre, on Finchley Road, Hampstead, London), a kind of origin story unfolds through the production of unlikely images, pictures that emerge through a very personal enquiry into identity, name and place.

Since graduating with her MFA from Columbia University, New York, Katz has worked consistently to establish a reputation as one of the most exciting painters of her generation. In 2020 she was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York; Gió Marconi, Milan; Antenna Space, Shanghai; and Dépendance, Brussels. She has exhibited widely across the European institutional scene – in exhibitions at the Fondation Carmignac, France, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, and at MANIFESTA 13, Marseille.

The exhibition at Camden Art Centre, which has a long-standing reputation for platforming artists at critical moments in their careers, marks a surge of attention on the UK stage. Her work is currently included in the survey show Mixing It Up: Painting Today, at Hayward Gallery, 2021; Between 2019-20, Katz was included in the group exhibition curated by Martin Herbert, Slow Painting, at the Leeds Museum and Art Gallery and The Levinsky Gallery, University of Plymouth. A new artists’ book, designed by Studio Mathias Clottu and co-published with MIT press, will extend the experience of Artery beyond the three exhibition iterations and will include essays by Martin Clark and Sam Thorne.

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. Significant recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the MIT List Center for the Arts, Cambridge, MA; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada; and Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. Notable group exhibitions include Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London, UK; The Imaginary Sea, Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France; Slow Painting, curated by Hayward Touring (presented at Leeds Museum and Art Gallery, Leeds, UK; Levinsky Galley, Plymouth, UK); Maskulinitäten, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; One If By Land, Powerlong Museum, Shanghai, China; City Prince/sess, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Paint, Also Known as Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland; and Puddle, Pothole, Portal, SculptureCenter, New York, NY. A comprehensive monograph on Katz’s work was published by JRP|Editions, Geneva in 2020.

Camden Art Centre is a place for world-class contemporary art exhibitions and education. Situated in Hampstead, North London (charity number 1065829) Camden Art Centre is a place for art and artists; a place for the curious, the novice and the expert alike. It’s a place to see, to make, to learn and to talk about contemporary art, whether in our building, attending off-site projects or via our digital forums. Founded by artists in 1965, the Centre continues to be a space for the most vital and diverse mix of practices and ideas and is dedicated to supporting artists at every stage of their careers.