After showing her work at the Venice Biennale in Italy, painter Allison Katz has new representation with Hauser & Wirth, one of the biggest galleries in the world. She will leave her New York gallery, Luhring Augustine, though she will continue with her other representatives, Antenna Space, Giò Marconi, and dépendance.
Katz will have her first show with Hauser & Wirth in 2023 at its Los Angeles gallery, one of 16 that the enterprise has worldwide. The London-based artist will also soon undertake a residency at Hauser & Wirth’s space in Somerset, England.
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In an email to ARTnews, Manuela Wirth, the gallery’s cofounder, said, “Allison Katz is among a compelling new generation of artists bringing forward fresh energy in the medium of painting. She is an assured innovator whose work derives power from its unique combination of intellectual rigour with a signature element of playfulness. She draws on a deep knowledge of art history and her own personal visual lexicon to explore an astounding breadth of ideas, often creating enigmas that stay with us and make us think.”
Much of what Katz produces takes the form of surreal figurative paintings filled with mysterious imagery. Fighting cocks, anthropomorphic pieces of produce, and foreboding mouths act as recurring elements in her work. She has called her works “active locations,” referring to the ways that they are intended to spur on alternate psychological states.
Photo Farzad Owrang/©Allison Katz/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
In Venice, as part of Cecilia Alemani’s main exhibition, she is showing new works that take the Italian city as their inspiration. One features the young girl whose death sets into motion the plot of Don’t Look Now, the famed 1973 arthouse horror film set in Venice. Katz renders the girl’s image several times over, as though her body had spawned ghosts of itself.
Katz’s also recently had her first major institutional show in the U.K. at the Camden Art Centre earlier this year. That exhibition is currently on view at Nottingham Contemporary.
She is one of the first artists in the main show of the 2022 Venice Biennale to get scooped up by a mega-gallery after exhibiting there. This past summer, Jadé Fadojutimi, a young painter known for her brightly colored abstractions, joined Gagosian.