Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, contemporary art has just found its most singular voice in the person of Allison Katz. This artist from Montreal, based in London since her studies at Columbia, today disrupts the codes of painting with a provocative intelligence that makes each canvas a territory of exploration where the intimate and the universal, the trivial and the sublime meet.
Faced with current pictorial production, often imprisoned by reactionary sentimentalism or neurotic perfection, Allison Katz offers a radical alternative. Her work operates as a necessary awakening, a salutary slap administered to an artistic milieu often too sure of its certainties. The “Artery” exhibition at the Camden Art Centre in 2022 was a manifesto in this respect: thirty works that transformed the gallery space into a laboratory of meaning, where each painting dialogued with the others according to a poetic logic that escaped traditional categories.
The signature as a shifting territory
Katz’s approach directly questions the very notion of “signature style” that still haunts the contemporary art market. Where other artists cultivate reassuring stylistic coherence, she practices a form of controlled schizophrenia, moving from hyperrealistic trompe-l’oeil to the most caricatural compositions. This versatility is not gratuitous: it questions the very mechanisms of artistic recognition, this economy of the identifiable that too often reduces art to branding.
In Akgraph (Tobias + Angel) (2021), the letters M, A, S, and K compose a calligraphic face above the ghostly representation of Tobie et l’Ange by Verrocchio. Ms. Allison Sarah Katz literally becomes MASK, revealing that artistic identity proceeds as much from the mask as from the revelation. This work perfectly synthesizes the artist’s approach: the autobiographical blends with art history, the signature becomes a motif, the intimate becomes universal.
The play with her own name runs through her entire work like an obsessive red thread. AK becomes AKA (“alias”), Allison transforms into “All Is On,” revealing this fundamental fascination with the act of naming that the artist claims. This practice of anagram and pun is not anecdotal: it reveals a profound understanding of the linguistic mechanisms that govern our relationship to the world.
The recurring use of rice grains glued to the pictorial surface constitutes another signature, paradoxically. These textural elements break the autonomy of the illusionistic painting, constantly reminding of the materiality of the painted object. In The Other Side (2021), these grains sprinkle the representation of a yellow rooster in motion, creating a dusting effect that evokes both poultry feed and the glitter of a cabaret show.
Literature and narrative strategies
Virginia Woolf’s influence deeply permeates Katz’s practice, who regularly quotes this Woolfian definition of poetry: “a voice responding to a voice” [1]. This dialogical conception of artistic creation structures her entire approach. Like the modernist writer, Katz rejects the purity of monologue and conceives every work as an engaged conversation with art history, popular culture, and her own biography.
This literary dimension manifests in her way of “painting as she writes,” in her own words, building around visual quotes. Her paintings function like novels in fragments, where each recurring motif – roosters, cabbages, mouths, and elevators – develops a personal vocabulary that enriches itself from canvas to canvas. This semantic accumulation recalls the narrative techniques of Gertrude Stein or James Joyce, where repetition gradually creates meaning.
The exhibition “Artery” perfectly illustrated this literary approach to space. The five mouth paintings, presented in a chevron formation on freestanding walls, transformed the gallery into a complex narrative device. Each “epiglottal perspective,” to borrow Brian Dillon’s flavorful expression, framed disparate scenes, an ornamental rooster, a cat with digital reflections, and the artist herself in a Miu Miu advertisement, creating a fragmented narrative effect where meaning emerged from the gaps.
This narrative strategy reaches its apex in the systematic use of self-mockery and anti-humor. The Cockfather (2021) features a rooster-shaped egg cup, proudly standing in a dark cave, condensing in one image the absurdity of the male artistic ego. The title, evoking both hipster restaurants and Francis Ford Coppola, reveals this capacity to transform the trivial into the epic, characteristic of the most inventive contemporary literature.
The Cabbage (and Philip) (2013-2020) series also illustrates this literary dimension. Each cabbage, painted with manic care, is placed alongside the silhouette of Philip, the artist’s partner. These “still life portraits” subvert traditional pictorial genres while creating a personal mythology where the intimate becomes universal. The anecdotal transforms into archetypal, revealing this “impossibility of being worthy of painting” that Katz claims and which paradoxically constitutes the source of her expressive power.
The influence of Clarice Lispector, another literary reference of the artist, shines through in this enigmatic approach to everyday life. This quote from the Brazilian writer, which Katz cherishes, “I did not decipher her. But she did not decipher me either,” could serve as an epigraph to her entire work. Like Lispector’s Sphinx, Katz’s paintings resist univocal interpretation while constantly inviting the search for meaning.
The temporal dimension, primordial to Woolf, finds in Katz an original plastic translation. Her “fleeting pigments,” referencing Joshua Reynolds’ experiments with unstable colors, question the permanence of art. This fascination with controlled degradation reveals a conception of pictorial time that goes beyond simple representation to touch the very ontology of the image.
Psychoanalysis and subjective construction
Katz’s work strikingly dialogues with Lacan’s theories of the mirror stage and subjective construction. Her multiple self-portraits, never frontal, always oblique, reveal an intuitive understanding of the identification mechanisms described by Jacques Lacan. The ego, according to the French psychoanalyst, is constituted through identification with an external image, a fundamentally alienating process that nonetheless structures access to subjectivity [2].
This constitutive alienation finds a particularly eloquent plastic translation in Katz’s “mouth” paintings. These internal perspectives, inspired by André Derain, transform the organ of speech into a frame of vision. In M.A.S.K. (2021), the artist paints herself from the inside of her own mouth, creating a device where the looking subject and the looked-at subject merge in a dizzying mise en abyme. This radical inversion of traditional perspective directly evokes Lacan’s analyses on the constitution of the ego through the gaze of the Other.
The recurrence of the elevator motif in her work is particularly interesting from this psychoanalytic perspective. Elevator III (Camden Art Centre) (2021), this striking trompe-l’oeil that opens the “Artery” exhibition, functions as a perfect metaphor for the identificatory process. The perfect illusion invites the viewer to enter a space that exists only through representation, thus mimicking the primordial experience of the mirror stage where the child identifies with an image he takes for the reality of his being.
This psychoanalytic dimension is also revealed in the treatment of bodily fragmentation, a central theme for Lacan. The ceramic nose sculptures, these “Nose/Ass” that condense in one object the organ of respiration and that of excretion, directly evoke the “fragmented body” described by psychoanalysis. These works materialize this anxiety of fragmentation that precedes the imaginary unification of the ego, revealing the drive underpinnings of all identity construction.
The relationship to the Other, a central concept of Lacan’s theory, also structures Katz’s curatorial approach. Her exhibition “In the House of the Trembling Eye” at the Aspen Art Museum in 2024 perfectly illustrated this dimension. By mixing her own works with fragments of Pompeii frescoes and pieces from local private collections, she created a temporal dialogue revealing how the contemporary subject is constituted through identification with images from elsewhere and long ago.
This curatorial practice logically extends her pictorial practice. Just as she “paints by citing,” she exhibits by creating constellations of meaning that go beyond mere juxtaposition. The organization of space according to the plan of the Roman domus revealed a sophisticated understanding of the projective and identificatory mechanisms that govern our relationship to images. Each room, atrium, triclinium, and tablinum functioned as a theater of subjectivity where works dialogued according to an unconscious logic.
The recurrent use of the signature as a visual element, displaced from its traditional location towards the center of the image, materializes this issue of identification. In several works, the letters of her name literally compose a face, revealing that identity proceeds as much from symbolic inscription as from specular recognition. This practice directly evokes Lacan’s analyses of symbolic alienation that presides over all subjective constitution.
Towards a poetics of indeterminacy
Katz’s originality lies in her ability to maintain the enigma while creating meaning. Her works resist univocal interpretation without ever descending into gratuitous hermeticism. This productive tension recalls the best achievements of conceptual art, but enriched with a pictorial sensuality often lacking in purely intellectual practices.
Her treatment of historical art perfectly illustrates this approach. Rather than citing directly, she proceeds through allusions, superpositions, and subtle distortions. Posterchild (2021), this reinterpretation of a 1930s London Underground poster, mixes personal and cultural references according to an associative logic that evokes both Freud and Warburg. The original poster praising the charms of Hampstead becomes a support for a personal mythology where childhood in Montreal, present-day London, and Italian Quattrocento art collide.
This poetics of indeterminacy finds its most beautiful expression in the series of mouths. These impossible framings, which transform the organ of speech into a window on the world, create a permanent perceptual disturbance. We see through the mouth, we speak through the eyes, the senses merge in a controlled synesthesia that reveals the complexity of our sensory relationships to reality.
The use of “fugitive” materials, those unstable pigments that evolve with time, participates in this aesthetics of indeterminacy. Like Reynolds’ colors that end up whitening, Katz’s works integrate their own becoming, refusing the reassuring fixity of traditional art. This open temporality transforms each painting into a process rather than a finished object.
The recurrence of certain motifs, roosters, cabbages, noses, and elevators, creates a personal vocabulary that evolves constantly. Each reappearance enriches the motif with new meanings, creating a semiotic system in perpetual expansion. The rooster from The Other Side dialogues with that of The Cockfather, Philip’s cabbages converse with those from previous exhibitions, creating a network of correspondences that structures the entire oeuvre.
This approach reveals a deep understanding of cultural memory mechanisms. Like Jung’s archetypal symbols, Katz’s motifs accumulate layers of meaning while retaining their capacity for immediate evocation. This personal symbolic economy dialogues with the major iconographic systems of Western art without ever being reduced to them.
Humor, omnipresent, functions as a dissolvent of certainties. These visual puns, these iconographic distortions, these cultural winks create a critical distance that prevents any sacralization. Katz’s art is serious without taking itself seriously, profound without gravity, complex without complication.
The exhibition as a total work
The architectural and scenographic dimension of Katz’s work is also interesting. Her exhibitions do not merely present art: they create meaningful environments where space itself becomes a bearer of meaning. This approach reveals an expanded conception of painting that goes beyond the traditional frame of the canvas to embrace the entire aesthetic experience.
The hanging of “Artery” perfectly illustrated this dimension. The self-supporting walls of the second room, built to the exact width of the canvases, transformed the space into an optical labyrinth where the viewer alternately discovered the mouth paintings and Philip’s cabbages. This spatial choreography revealed unsuspected correspondences between the works, creating a metadiscourse on the relationships between visible and hidden, recto and verso, public and private.
This scenographic design finds its climax in “In the House of the Trembling Eye.” By transposing the structure of the Pompeian domus into the contemporary museum space, Katz created a dizzying temporal device where antiquity and contemporaneity responded to each other. This archaeology of the present revealed the permanence of certain symbolic structures across millennia, questioning our assumptions about artistic modernity.
The recurring use of posters as exhibition elements reveals a sophisticated reflection on the temporalities of art. These announcements, designed for each exhibition, function as autonomous works that extend the experience beyond its official duration. Displayed in the gallery space and then preserved as collectible objects, they challenge the boundaries between art and communication, between artwork and documentation.
This practice of poster making also reveals a keen awareness of the mechanisms of artistic promotion. By creating her own communication media, Katz takes back control of a dimension often neglected by artists. These posters, which unfold her visual vocabulary according to the codes of graphic design, reveal the interconnections between art and cultural industry.
A critical contemporaneity
In the current artistic context, marked by a problematic return to traditional figuration and increasing market standardization, Katz’s work offers an alternative path. Her rejection of picturesque easiness as well as gratuitous provocations reveals a rare artistic maturity. She proves that it is possible to be accessible without being complacent, complex without being hermetic, contemporary without being opportunistic.
This critical stance is particularly evident in her relationship to the art industry. Her appearance in a Miu Miu advertising campaign, which she then transforms into pictorial material in M.A.S.K., reveals an ability to play with the codes of spectacle while maintaining a critical distance. This infiltration strategy, which consists of accepting the game to better subvert it, evokes the finest achievements of critical art of the 1960s.
Her international success, participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, exhibitions in the most prestigious institutions, and representation by international galleries have not deterred her from her fundamental questioning. This resistance to the siren calls of the market reveals an artistic integrity that commands admiration in a field often corrupted by commercial logic.
The recent evolution of her work, marked by a complexification of exhibition devices and a broadening of her conceptual palette, reveals an artist at the peak of her maturity. Allison Katz has reached that rare zone where technical virtuosity and conceptual depth mutually nourish each other to create a truly personal artistic language.
Her ability to constantly renew her approach while maintaining deep coherence reveals an exceptional understanding of the contemporary stakes of painting. In a world saturated with images, she manages to create visual objects that stop the gaze and nourish reflection. This capacity to halt, to suspend the contemporary visual flow, may be her greatest achievement.
Katz’s intelligence lies in her ability to turn constraints into creative opportunities. The limits of the pictorial medium become pretexts for invention, the codes of traditional exhibition are subverted to create new experiences, cultural references are recycled to generate unprecedented meaning. This transformative alchemy reveals an authentic artist’s temperament, capable of perpetually regenerating her approach without ever losing her guiding thread.
The artery and the heart
Facing Allison Katz’s work, we measure the distance that separates true art from its many contemporary counterfeits. Where others merely illustrate their intentions, she invents a language. Where others repeat tried-and-true formulas, she risks the unknown. Where others seek to seduce, she chooses to question.
The title “Artery” today resonates as a perfect metaphor for her artistic approach. The artery irrigates, nourishes, keeps alive. It connects the heart to the extremities, ensures vital circulation, allows exchange and renewal. Katz fully assumes this circulatory function in the contemporary art landscape. Her works circulate meaning between past and present, intimate and universal, trivial and sublime.
This capacity for circulation reveals a deeply generous conception of art. Refusing both haughty elitism and populist demagogy, Allison Katz creates works that speak simultaneously to the enlightened amateur and the curious novice. This accessibility is never facilitated: it results from technical and conceptual mastery that allows her to address the most complex subjects with apparent simplicity.
Her influence on the young generation of artists is already beginning to be felt. This hybrid approach, which blends pictorial virtuosity and conceptual sophistication, autobiography and theoretical reflection, humor and depth, opens new avenues for contemporary painting too often confined to reductive alternatives. She proves that it is possible to be both rooted in tradition and resolutely contemporary, personal and universal, accessible and demanding.
Katz’s work also reveals the decisive importance of intelligence in contemporary artistic creation. Facing an art market often dominated by fashion trends and marketing strategies, she reminds us that true art is born as much from thought as from sensitivity. This intellectual dimension, far from drying up emotion, nourishes and enriches it, creating works that resist the wear of time and visual saturation.
In a world where images proliferate without creating meaning, where communication too often replaces communion, where immediacy erases duration, Allison Katz’s art reminds us of the virtues of slowness, reflection, and progressive deepening. Her paintings demand time: time to look, time to understand, and time to let their subtle spells work. This specific temporality, irreducible to contemporary immediacy, may be her most precious contribution.
The Canadian artist ultimately offers us far more than a corpus of remarkable works: she proposes a lesson in creative freedom. Her capacity to perpetually invent new plastic solutions, to constantly renew her formal vocabulary, to surprise while maintaining deep coherence, reveals the infinite possibilities still open to contemporary painting. In a context often marked by pessimism and repetition, this creative energy is a valuable stimulant.
Because it is indeed energy that is at stake. The energy of someone who refuses well-worn paths, the energy of someone who transforms constraints into freedoms, the energy of someone who continues to believe in the specific powers of painting in a world saturated with digital images. This energy, Allison Katz generously transmits to those who know how to receive it, creating around her work this community of free spirits that constitutes the true audience of contemporary art.
Allison Katz’s work thus reminds us that art, at its highest level, remains this “secret transaction” that Virginia Woolf spoke of, this “voice answering a voice” that transcends centuries and unites consciences. In the contemporary visual noise, she manages to make this unique voice heard, which transforms anyone who knows how to listen to it. This capacity for transformation, both individual and collective, perhaps constitutes the most beautiful promise of her art: that of a world where intelligence and sensitivity, tradition and innovation, the intimate and the universal could finally harmoniously dialogue.
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando, 1928. This quote, regularly cited by Katz, comes from the passage: “Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
- Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I”, Écrits, Seuil, 1966.
