The works in the exhibition are different in style, subject matter, even the way the paint is applied, showing a wide level of craft, ability and talent that is impressive. Yet each work, even when painted in a completely different style, remains recognizably the work of Allison Katz.
Katz grew up in Montreal, attended Concordia College there before getting her MFA at Columbia in New York. She now lives in London. Last summer while doing a residency at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset property, Katz was already thinking about her LA show, having visited the space in West Hollywood.
The resulting works are themselves inspired both by Katz’s Somerset residency and her thoughts of Hollywood, Los Angeles and the West, and have been installed in ways that interact or reference the architectural features of Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood space.
Sheepish by Allison Katz, 2023. PHOTO: KEITH LUBOW © ALLISON KATZ COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH
So, for example, Sheepish, depicts a wall in which there is amoeba-shaped hole through which we can see a fragment of the Hollywood sign and there is also a lamb seeking to make its way out of the other side. Turns out the amoeba-like shape are the geographic contours of Somerset itself, where Katz’s studio was surrounded by grazing sheep, and the fragment of the sign looks like it says “Wool” rather than Hollywood, which is funny given the lamb. There is also a triptych of works, Responding, inspired by the pond outside her Somerset Studio and the teeming life that seems to be its own abstract universe of color and figures that conflate animal and human with earth, water, and sky.
Or take for example, Eternity, where a worker is peering down from a skylight he is installing – painted in a hyper-realist style, a painting which Katz chose to install beneath a skylight in the gallery space.
One of the more striking works in the exhibition Catwalk, features multiple exposures of a woman walking with a purposeful stride – the work is inspired by 1970s advertising for L’Eggs (a hosiery company) –but here the brand seems to be AK (Allison Katz), At the same time Catwalk recalls Marcel Duchamp’s nude descending a staircase, as well as Muybridge’s motion studies.
Katz’s sly humor and love of word play works its way into many of her works. Her painting called Venice Peaches includes a view from the water of Venice, Italy and not Venice, California. Her painting, “A Tad Naïve” features her face on the back of a tadpole. Another, Don’t A.S.K. is a picture of two chickens crossing the road (while also featuring Katz’s initials in the work’s title).
Her works are often personal. For example, Truth, features a woman looking at a Giacometti sculpture, which is based on a photograph of Katz’s grandmother, Ruth. Katz used modeling paste to build up the surface of the the Giacometti Walking Man, giving the work a sculptural quality. This is no doubt my own projection, but Giacometti’s work has always made me think of the existential problem of living in a post-Auschwitz world. I wondered if, to Katz, her grandmother also represented that generation who saw the horrors of the Shoah firsthand.
Katz’s work is also very much about portals through which we travel into different landscapes and experiences, whether it is a glance through a rear-view mirror, in Rear, at a road that resembles a woman from the back, or any of the other works where we are peering into different worlds. The sense of play, the references, the word play, and jokes in her work, are themselves ways to alchemize our reaction to Katz as an artist and, in a way, a deflection of how serious Katz takes her work.
It is a journey that looking at Katz’s paintings at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood impels us to take, with the cry of “Westward Ho!”
