Artist & Curator Walkthrough: Allison Katz & Cecilia Alemani on ‘Allison Katz. Outta the Bag’

Why It Matters

Katz’s immersive, language‑driven approach redefines solo painting exhibitions as narrative environments, shaping curatorial strategies and market expectations for contemporary art.

Key Takeaways

• Katz treats exhibition space as an active, three‑dimensional canvas.
• Wordplay and titles guide viewers through layered visual narratives.
• Recurrent symbols—mouths, roosters, peacocks— act as mutable containers.
• Color choices emerge from relational dialogue among all paintings.
• Material experiments (rice, sand, marble) blur illusion and surface reality.

Summary

The video records a walkthrough of Allison Katz’s first major New York solo show, “Outta the Bag,” at Hauser & Wirth, hosted by senior director Zoe Sprling and curated in dialogue with High Line chief curator Cecilia Alemani. The conversation frames the exhibition as a study of painting’s capacity to record, absorb, and transmit, using language, humor, and autobiographical symbols to create a layered visual narrative. Katz explains that she conceives the walls and street façade simultaneously, treating the gallery as an extension of the canvas. She positions two “guardian” paintings to draw visitors inward, employs one‑point perspective both on the wall and in the composition, and lets titles like “First Impression” function as verbal frames that steer interpretation. Recurring motifs—mouths, roosters, peacocks—serve as mutable containers for personal and art‑historical references, while color palettes emerge from an ongoing relational dialogue among the works rather than from pre‑planned schemes. Throughout the talk, Katz offers concrete examples: the mouth painting references early 20th‑century exhibition architecture and the digestive tract; the pool self‑portrait titled “Burden” interrogates the image as a weight and a portal; the rooster incorporates rice and sand to collapse illusion with tactile surface. Alemani highlights the exhibition’s theatrical staging, noting how the skylight, street view, and partition walls become part of the narrative, echoing Katz’s belief that “the wall is almost a painting itself.” The discussion underscores a broader shift in contemporary painting: works are conceived as relational objects that exist both within and beyond the exhibition space, influencing how collectors and museums acquire and display them. Katz’s integration of material experimentation, linguistic play, and spatial choreography offers a template for future solo shows that aim to engage audiences as active participants rather than passive viewers.

Original Description

On the occasion of ‘Allison Katz. Outta the Bag,’ the Montreal-born, London-based artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York, we hosted a walkthrough with artist Allison Katz and Cecilia Alemani, Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art.

‘Allison Katz. Outta the Bag,’ extends Katz's inquiry into the capaciousness of painting—what it can record, absorb and transmit. Wit and lived experience ripple through art-historical citations, modes of self-portraiture and allusions to the precarity of an image-saturated world. Language, too, operates as a structuring device. Through wordplay, expressions and elliptical titles—beginning with the exhibition’s, which reminds us that showing one’s work is a bit like revealing a secret—Katz creates verbal frames elastic enough to hold both the playful and the erudite, allowing meaning to slip, collide and subtly steer the viewer’s path through the work.

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Hauser & Wirth is an international contemporary and modern art gallery with spaces in Zurich, London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, St. Moritz, Monaco, Menorca, Paris and Basel.

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