Allison Katz: Artery

Allison Katz: Artery
Titled Artery, Allison Katz's exhibition is the London-based Canadian artist's first institutional solo show in the UK. It is a collaboration with Camden Art Centre, where it will open in January 2022.

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 humour and curiosity, her works articulate a tricksy language of recurring forms—roosters, monkeys and cabbages, among other things. Katz's paintings, as well as her ceramics and posters, are frequently bodily and relentlessly wordy, thick with puns and allusions. What emerges from these multilayered works is a sustained and critical pursuit of what the artist has called “genuine ambiguity.”

For Katz, Artery is a resonant and loaded title. Katz has said, “I want to emphasise the non-order of things, from inside to out.” Arteries are inside us, but they also connect us: the “arterial” is used to describe major highways, subterranean cabling, branching rail networks, and winding river systems. This exhibition is preoccupied by these networks and channels, by the spaces between inside and outside, you and me, experience and image.

All of the works in Artery have been made in the last year. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, designed by Studio Mathias Clottu.