Recipient of the 2023 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO, Montreal-born, UK-based artist Allison Katz makes her AGO debut with an intimate presentation of new and recent works on canvas. Defying traditional categorization, her paintings merge realism with the fantastic, incorporating wordplay and literary, historical, and autobiographic details to upend viewers’ expectations.
Truth (2023), a large-scale painting depicting the artist's grandmother Ruth looking at a Giacometti sculpture greets visitors to the space. A nod to the modernist works installed nearby and the artist's own interest in exhibition design, the painting arrests both the eye and the step, installed on a threshold just inside the entrance, asking visitors to negotiate the artwork as both a painting and a sculptural object.
To celebrate Inner Momentum, Allison Katz has created a limited-edition poster for shopAGO. Posters will be available in-store and online beginning July 18, 2025. For more details visit shop.ago.ca/
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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. Katz’s work investigates the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, information systems, graphic icons, and art history. Her diverse imagery, including roosters, cabbages, mouths, fairies and noses, appears as recurring signs that build a constellation of ideas and references, which transmute across the mediums of painting, posters, ceramics, and installations.
Katz received widespread critical recognition for her first travelling UK solo exhibition Artery at Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Camden Art Centre (2022). The exhibition was accompanied by the richly illustrated publication Artery, which situates itself somewhere between a monograph, an exhibition catalogue, and an artist’s book. Other recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Aspen Art Museum (2024) Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA (2023); the MIT List Center for the Arts, Cambridge, MA (2018); Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada (2018); and Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2015). Notable group exhibitions include Capturing the Moment,
Tate Modern, London, UK (2024); In Focus, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands (2024), Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams, La Biennale di Venezia, 59th International Exhibition, Venice, Italy (2022); Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); Slow Painting, curated by Hayward Touring, presented at Leeds Museum and Art Gallery, Leeds, UK; Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, UK (2020); Maskulinitäten, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2019); and Paint, Also Known as Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2019).
