Artist: Allison Katz
Exhibition title: Artery (Posters 2012 – 2021)
Curated by: Martin Clark
Venue: Canada House, London, UK
Date: January 17 – March 26, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Canada House, London
For more than a decade, Allison Katz (b. 1980, Montreal, Canada) has been exploring painting’s relationship to questions of identity and expression, selfhood and voice. Animated by a restless sense of curiosity and humour, 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.
Here, in the gallery at Canada House, Katz has created an abundant installation drawn from her extensive archive of announcement posters that she has been creating in relation to her exhibitions over the last 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 familiar tropes of advertising and graphic design. For Katz, the construction of images as posters operates within an expanded practice, a way of playfully approaching protocols and procedures of typography, language and graphics; as much for their own sake as for asking questions around consumption, desire and the construction of memory. She will often quote site-specific details from the architecture, season, or iconography of the exhibition’s location, grounding the posters in the time and place where they are first shown, before developing their potential context within her own imagery. She reflects: ‘It involves a circulation where I’m copying myself and appropriating my own work to expand it from the inside. It leaves the specific surface of painting, but it’s still drawn from a painting sensibility.’
This presentation extends beyond the gallery at the Canadian High Commission to a concurrent exhibition of paintings titled Artery at Camden Art Centre in Hampstead, North London. It also follows an earlier version of this exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, where a series of posters were installed in the City of Caves, a cave network open to the public below the museum.
For this new work the artist is preoccupied by the concept of networks and channels, by the spaces between inside and outside, and how these are connected. Across the four sites of these exhibitions, Katz’s exhibition unfolds through a series of biographical anecdotes and moments of synchronicity and chance, including her Canadian nationality, the post–war meeting of her exiled maternal grandparents in Nottingham, and Katz’s childhood home, which was on Finchley Road, Hampstead, Quebec, mirroring that of Camden Art Centre’s address on Finchley Road, Hampstead, London.
The exhibition at Canada House combines archival posters alongside the new series of those made for Artery. The installation disregards chronology in favour of visual affinities and chance pairings. She has also taken over the signage outside Canada House, designing the exterior banner and posters. Katz’s banner comes as a response to the classical design of the diplomatic mission’s standard – combining the iconic red colour with a surrogate for the traditional maple leaf: a cabbage. This motif has had an enduring presence in Katz’s practice since 2013 (in over 30 portrait-sized paintings) and with this humorous gesture the artist reflects on both personal, and national, mythologies. The humble cabbage, with its head and heart, has a complex system of arterial veins that run through its leaves, bringing its form to life and connecting it to the title of the exhibition: Artery.
The exhibition is curated by Martin Clark, Director of Camden Art Centre
Artery continues at Camden Art Centre, Finchley Road, NW3 6DG from 14 January – 13 March 2022 Visit camdenartcentre.org for more information
Biography
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 Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; 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; 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 in 2020.
Camden Art Centre
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.
