The Brooklyn Rail

From the first moment we see Allison Katz’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s SoHo location—walking through the doors or even taking a peek through the windows—we’re ushered into the world she has established for her work, encompassing in one glance all the different tactics she deploys. The show’s title, Outta the Bag, activates a pun on her name (the “Katz” is implied). The gallery’s layout, modified with newly built walls, mimics the proscenium stage-like floorplan of a Roman house, something Katz has been investigating since participating in a research fellowship at Pompeii Commitment in 2022. And once inside, our eye is inexorably drawn to a single image—a portrait of the artist taken from a 2021 Miu Miu advertisement merged with an upended image of a Murano rooster figurine—installed at the back of the gallery to draw focus and pull us in, as would the tablinum, the office room where the owner of an ancient house would conduct business. Tablinum takes its name from a tabula or a picture. Katz’s canvas superimposes itself on the concept and the floorplan of the tablinum, doubling it and reinforcing it, while playfully asserting its own order on the exhibition as a whole. That the image is topsy-turvy is entirely its point, or at least one of them.

Katz walked me through the exhibition a day before its official opening, generously speaking about each painting in turn. We have edited and condensed the conversation for clarity and length.

Amanda Gluibizzi (Rail): Were all of the paintings made this year?

Allison Katz: Some were started earlier, but I conceived of them as a group this past year and got very excited about how they related to each other. Every painting I start is different from every other one, just on the surface level, on a material level. But it’s a process, so when something would shift inside one painting, I would have to make adjustments elsewhere, and that meant some paintings didn’t make the cut in the end. I kept trying to find the right combination. I introduced the most recent painting, Marginalia (all works 2026), late in the game, a surprise addition that only appeared with force because of what the other paintings ended up being, and I suddenly felt something was missing.

Rail: And what are you looking for when you realize, “Okay, the painting that I was making doesn’t work with what I’m hoping for.” Do you have an end goal in mind? Or are you looking for something that’s going to shoot off and create that tangent?

Katz: I think, in a way, what I’m looking for is an expansive answer to the question. Each painting asks a question or makes a proposition, and then there’s something about the combination that would expand that versus trying to answer it. I like the term “off rhyme”—something that almost rhymes, but not in the expected way. I was recently doing a deep dive into poetry terms—because they’re technical—to learn how a poem is built. There’s a moment where words can become functional, to elongate a sound, or draw out another meaning, or shape the tone. It was useful to think about that in relation to painting.

Rail: Right, functional only in this world that you’re creating.

Katz: Exactly. But this world also exists concretely in space. I visited the gallery two years ago, before I had started any of the paintings. When possible, I think of the room and its configuration at the same time as the individual paintings. I have these long-standing or developing motifs that will surpass the instant of the exhibition, but the way that I can imagine the whole is by building the walls and the paintings mentally at the same time. It’s knit together in a way; there is a symbiotic relationship between the layout and the painting, even though it’s not completely fixed. There are these surplus situations to what’s happening on the canvas, and they can end up informing the content within them. It was all quite theatrical and about directing the gaze. This SoHo gallery is on the street, and it gave me the chance to recreate the scene in my own way. I wanted it to be that when you’re walking by, you only see one painting from the street, and then when you come in and get closer, you see a configuration of three, and so on. The two paintings on the built walls that flank the furthest one at the back act like guardians, drawing you in.

Rail: It’s almost as if the canvases and the installation are like a warp and a weft. They overlap and sometimes recede and sometimes take precedence, but you can’t have one without the other.

Katz: That’s the gift of an exhibition for me. It’s a temporary gathering that gets built into the independent object, which will then resume a life of its own. Like you say, the importance of the walls and the work sometimes recedes and sometimes comes forward, but they are a part of my painting process; they feel equally material.

Rail: In this space, you have light sources coming from at least two different directions, from the skylights above and from the floor to ceiling windows at the front. This is a curious thing to think about, not just in terms of cast shadows and things like that, but also building out these two initial walls, where you don’t have anything on them that you can see from the street. They showcase Allusion Cuts, this single image, hung at the back of the gallery. That’s all you can see, and it causes you to come in and keep going further and further.

Katz: I wanted to create intrigue and curiosity with a glimpse. It also has to be different from a shop window where all can be seen at once. But more exciting to me is creating a path of anticipation, of walking up to the painting like a bride. It’s a heightened experience. But single-point perspective is not how it feels to live inside a painting. It’s staged. It’s ideologically cleaned up as an experience that’s very tidy. And I think I’ve always felt a little bit of the tension with exhibiting, because it gets rid of the more porous feelings of belief and doubt, of the process of the studio. If one thinks about perspective in the Western tradition, it’s really about getting your eye to see in a specific way that isn’t natural. That isn’t human; it’s mathematical, it’s directed, so it’s a choice. I was trying to reflect some of these conditions.

Rail: When we say something like, “You have to go get your eye in,” that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right? A completely artificial way of getting one eye into a painting. I was so fascinated by the mouth paintings because they permit you to do single-point perspective in this totally artificial way that acknowledges the artificiality of single-point perspective.

Katz: The painting First Impression reflects the entire exhibition within its composition. It comes from me discovering the archive of MoMA’s first exhibition in 1929. The documentation is only in black and white. I sourced the original paintings but I had to invent the colors of the walls and floors, which got me thinking about bodily interiors too. The rooms were so chaotic, they’re full of venting ducts, weird lighting, furniture; paintings are even installed on exit doors. But what I loved about it so much was that it showed those works when they were treated as contemporary art. The values were not fixed. This was experimenting. They called the show just the names of the four artists: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh. It was on for a month. The canon feels so obvious now, but again, it’s a bit like one-point perspective: it’s a choice, and it’s based on certain people’s ideas. Plus luck, chance, and the conditions of the times.

This painting solidified for me a lot of the ways images are received. I went through several titles with this one. But in the end, First Impression felt exactly right. Aside from the fact that it was MoMA’s first exhibition, and it’s Post-Impressionism, it’s also about wanting to make a good first impression, as if paintings are a body, and that encounter is alive. And it works both ways: like I want to make a good impression on the painting, and I want the painting to make a good impression on me. [Laughter] This is all happening in your gut, something that’s in your body. It’s unconscious. And apparently first impressions are very hard to shift. Which is kind of scary to think about, because of the instinct to control things. I thought, in what ways can I make and receive with the same frequency? Because with painting, some of the pleasure of it for me is changing my mind and not sticking with the first impression, almost like being undone by process, by time, by accidents, not holding on to my own taste. So, in a way, I want to imply the antithesis of a first impression.

Rail: It’s funny this single-point perspective ending with the horizon line that is Georges Seurat, who is, of course, notorious for not creating that sort of painting, and then trying to explode that sort of painting. If you didn’t know that this represents the first MoMA show, you might think that this is your ideal museum.

Katz: The joke, too, is that this hang looks intentional from this angle, as though there was only one painting at the furthest point, the way I have done it in my show, but in reality, there were at least a dozen paintings on either side of the Seurat, hanging closely beside each other in a line. The line was the radical aspect.

Rail: That display strategy: they were still coming out of salon hangs. It suggests that the mouth paintings are so deliberate while also reading as really instinctive.

Katz: The mouth paintings are always the height of my body. In some way, that’s…

Rail: A Mark Rothko ploy, right?

Katz: Well not a ploy but just a way to embed measurements equal to my body that go beyond the image.

Rail: I always love thinking about Rothko making paintings his height, and then hanging them so low, because you realize when you walk up to it that you’re standing at the heart height of Rothko or the hand height of Rothko. And then you think about a different, somatically specific, way of experiencing painting.

Katz: Yes, it’s a bodily index. Because when you start bringing your own scale into things, something unexpected happens. And for me, “my own scale” could even refer to my name. Like the title of the show, Outta the Bag. Aside from the obvious Katz/cats, the expression “to let the cat out of the bag” is all about a slip. It’s always a reveal, right? Something slips out, accidentally, past its frame. I love the idea of comparing painting to a secret being let out. Embarrassment is a real part of how painting feels sometimes. I don’t even know what I want to say ultimately. It’s giving a wide berth to intentionality which I feel is a helpful reminder when representation is involved. An image is not always a direct cause and effect of will.

Rail: What would you have done if your name did not lend itself to puns?

Katz: I’m assuming I’d manage to do it with any name! I thought of this exhibition’s title many years ago. I just needed the right instance.

Rail: Yeah, you don’t want to just spend it, right?

Katz: This is my first solo painting show in New York in over fifteen years, so it’s been a while. I take painting seriously, but not myself. I think that’s an important distinction. The artist persona is built to move in and out of others’ expectations. The medieval origin of the title’s expression is actually about getting something other than expected or intended.

Rail: When looking at the images in reproduction before our conversation, the image I was really into was Reflection.

Katz: There’s very little paint on it. It’s really the sand on the surface that’s pulling it out and combining with the light to give it depth. When I first started painting, I remember looking at Diego Velázquez and realizing how little paint he used, that it all seemed animated by a bit of pigment and breath.

Rail: I knew that there was the sand texture in it because I had looked at the details carefully, and I’m glad I did, because that would have probably knocked me back a few steps. I realized that I didn’t know what I was seeing, you know? I was very interested in this man in the background, because he feels so Constructivist, which then, of course, is echoed in the reflections. I’m not entirely sure what they’re reflecting, or if they’re reflecting anything.

Katz: It’s based on a photograph of a window installation. My father is a carpenter. I grew up looking at his construction materials, his magazines and how-to manuals. I grew up with him moving walls, which I feel gave me a kind of—

Rail: Confidence that walls can be moved.

Katz: Yes. I remember going to his job sites and being mesmerized by the way they would reshape the interior of a house. Walls that seemed fixed were suddenly in a different location. Something simple like installing a window can become a metaphysical allegory of painting. Just reflecting on reflection: things suddenly open up, and they become painting, right?

Rail: When I was preparing for our conversation, I kept coming back to the Reflection painting. And then when I was going through the images again before we met, I realized, “Wait a minute, there’s another arm. Okay, I need to ask about this.” You’re basically using it as a readymade, a readymade you’ve already made and one that we might see in other artworks. So yes, it is about the hand, but it’s also about this other thing: you’ve armed yourself.

Katz: Yes, I love that. When I was a teenager, I had a series of operations on my right arm, which gave me a young experience of chronic pain. Thankfully it’s gone now, but I’m right-handed: it’s my painting arm, so there’s always been a hyperconsciousness around the arm as the receptacle of both pain and inspiration. It’s a tool, but it can be fragile. And there’s this strange thing about thinking about one body part separately, almost like Frankenstein, how we’re made of these composite parts. The arm painting is called Marginalia, because I was thinking about scribbling notes in the margins, all the stories that surround the center, a chronic arm that chronicles, keeping track, keeping time. Muscle memory. It is a crazy fact of evolution that over millions of years the brain coordinated itself so specifically to the arm and hand when it comes to making things.

Rail: Do you know the Hendrick Goltzius drawing of his hand?

Katz: No!

Rail: He had a horrible accident as a child—he fell into a fire—and his hand was terribly mangled. He became famous as one of the great draughtsmen of his age despite or perhaps because of his hand. It’s a portrait of the artist, but also of pain.

Behind the arm you’ve painted the receding grid of a New York apartment building’s windows. Parts of the image are flat like a modernist grid, but other parts depict a turn in the building’s orientation. The grid runs off the canvas, so it winds up being a field and a way of moving us into the rest of the show.

Katz: Yeah, I was thinking about this yesterday. The arm at the center is painted on sand; it’s gritty flesh. The windows are smooth, made of glass. Absorption versus reflection. The grit and the grid. These contrasts hold the consciousness of the painting on the surface. And it opens out into other forms of reality. Right now, the light in the room is even. But starting around noon, there can be extreme raking light. I always had the vision of Marginalia being hung on the built wall, but I had no idea or way of knowing in advance that the angle of the light aligns exactly with the painted shadow. It was so freaky. We were in the middle of installing the show when it first happened, and everyone just stopped, like whoa.

Rail: The serendipity there!

Katz: Exactly. These are the alchemical moments I live for. And they help orient me towards abstract processes, things I can’t control, different ways to take the figure beyond itself. That’s my motivation, to create an image that can’t be removed from how it was made, that there’s an experience of seeing it and not knowing how to separate it from its materiality, which is not always my idea. For example, the painting Allusion Cuts comes from the randomness of the printing process. When my catalogue Artery was being printed in 2022, I found the pages used to clean the printing press after each lithographic plate was done in the recycling bin, and they were compilations of my own paintings, randomly printed one over top of the other. It was the most amazing discovery, to find these new machine-generated compositions that exceeded anything I could have designed. The title Allusion Cuts was pointing to this: alluding to works I’ve already painted, cut through mechanically at random by another image, an off-rhyme with my own name. But I had the challenge of figuring out how to paint this new version of my own paintings, suddenly embedded within each other, what the machine did so effortlessly that I had to figure out in paint.

Rail: It’s such an interesting way of thinking about artificial intelligence. The rooster is upside down and facing out. The self-portrait is upright but cut through by the rooster. It even looks like her hand becomes a wing. You have only two images superimposed, but you actually have multiple coordinates or directions.

Katz: Exactly.

The self-portrait in this painting does feel like a hologram to me, one that light passes through. It comes from a unique set-up: posing for an advertisement. It prompted me to ask the question: what if your self-portrait is made by someone else? It was my one chance to use mass media as a mirror. Instead of looking at myself directly, I was looking through layers of mediation and industry. I wanted painting to recoup that alienation, playfully. It was a thought experiment. I had been reconstituted for another function and painting was a way to retrieve it and reflect upon the ways that the self is always a collage.

I think about it in relation to the painting P-Cock with Portrait. In that painting, I reproduced (in a one to one scale) a portrait that I sat for in 2003 by the artist Susannah Phillips. I was in my early twenties. I was learning to paint at the same time that I was learning to pose. I had the experience of being a mask or material for someone else and their style, and that fused with my own relationship to what I wanted to paint. I was both the painting and the painter. That’s also why the image of the palette in that painting is literally the one I used to paint the painting with; it is an image of its own creation. Rather than mix the paint on a separate surface to the canvas, I combined them. It’s the collapse between being and making that I wanted to visualize.

Rail: I wasn’t confident that your motifs necessarily mean the same thing every time, or if they mean anything, or maybe sometimes they mean something and sometimes they don’t mean something. “Why does she use this image over and over again?” Perhaps it is a signal. Thinking about off rhyming: maybe what you’re doing is you’re creating an epic poem, and these are your vocabulary.

Katz: Like a refrain, yes, or a leitmotif in music. In poems like The Odyssey, the repetitions were pneumatic devices for memory. I do think there’s an interesting triangulation between memory, image, and repetition. My favorite line from Emily Dickinson is, “‘It is finished’ can never be said of us,” because there’s this feeling that the point is not to finish; it’s to extend.

Repetition is meaning in and of itself. It’s pleasure and comfort. It can be traumatic and compulsive, the way Sigmund Freud framed it, but it could just as well be a form of grounding or rooting to get deeper, while also being a testing. I myself don’t really understand it. When questioning my taste, sometimes I feel I understand my motivations, and other times I don’t. Embarrassment can be a gauge, and there’s always a risk when images are representational. Of course, I have to risk my own face, and my own experience. I would feel uncomfortable portraying someone else, because then I feel like I’m speaking on behalf of someone else’s experience. And trying to get to the bottom of the expectations around painting and being an artist and history and the canon and all these things would have to begin from my own embarrassment, from my own sense of testing. That’s why I’ve never felt comfortable asking someone else to sit the way I did, because that would feel too artificial. I’m more interested in the artificiality that begins even sooner, within the self.

Rail: It makes me think differently, too, about the mouth paintings, and the idea that the stomach is made up of nerves and therefore is its own brain. So, they’re intimately connected then not just to a gut feeling, but also a gut thinking.

Katz: I mean, in ancient Greece, it was believed the future could be predicted by interpreting the gurgling sounds made by the stomach—“gastromancy” was a trusted form of divination. For me, words like “taste,” “digestion,” and “hunger” apply to process, to art. I only realized a few days ago when I said it aloud that palate, the roof of the mouth or someone’s taste, is phonetically the same as palette, the artist’s tool. It’s just a coincidence but it generates ideas.

Rail: Yes, or art has its own language, too. You mentioned your favorite Emily Dickinson line. I have my favorite Ludwig Wittgenstein line: “if a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.” Just because it can speak its language doesn’t mean we speak that language. I think that’s one of the interesting things that your painting is making us think about: paintings are communicating to us, but we may not speak painting.

Katz: Or could there be different dialects of painting? I always saw painting as non-hierarchical, totally horizontal. A group of my paintings is really considered, because it’s all facets of the same possibility. And I want, personally, to understand painting as an expanded thing, not as aligning to some ultimate, singular style or achievement. Painting reflects something that is outside of experience. That wanting to prolong it, or wanting to stretch it out, that’s also a way of feeling alive.