Allison Katz
*First Impression*, 2026
Oil and acrylic on linen, 160 x 145 x 3.6cm / 63 x 571 / 8 x 13/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

text by Emma Grimes

At Hauser & Wirth, Allison Katz’s show Outta The Bag, her first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location, is on view. In this latest series of works, Katz makes her usual references: there’s a still-life of a cabbage, a couple roosters, a coral-pink caricature of a mouth, many windows, and plenty of nods to art history. Katz still has a predilection for words too: what they can do to, with, and alongside the canvas.

The exhibition opens with an image of a young, blonde-haired man hanging a framed painting onto what appears to be a windowsill. We’re thus primed with an acknowledgment of art’s capacity to function like a window, to transform an empty white wall into something else entirely. Interestingly, though, the title of this painting, Reflection, reverses the analogy, shifting attention away from how these mediums open up the world and instead underscores their mirror-like quality; that is, how what one sees out there—whether in a painting or the world at large—is a reflection of one’s inner world. Katz seems interested in painting not as a way of looking through, but of looking back.

Allison Katz
*Reflection*, 2026
Oil, acrylic and sand on canvas, 160 x 145 x 3.6 cm / 63 x 57 1/8 x 1 3/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

The details in Reflection, as in all of Katz’s work, are impressive. The figure is entirely composed of sand that’s densely glued onto the canvas, then painted over. The three-dimensional sand makes the vivid strokes of paint feel as though they’re protruding out into the room.

Across the room hangs First Impression, which is an illustration of the Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition in 1929, surrounded by a set of white teeth and pink gums. In fine detail, paintings from Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh are recreated inside the wide-open mouth. Life and art are taken in, for Katz, at the gut level: not the eyes, ears, or nose—which are all too cursory—but the mouth, where one chews, tastes, digests. Both Reflection and First Impression, in speaking to the mechanics of looking and engaging with art, are shrewd introductions to the rest of the show.

One of the most striking paintings is Burden. It shows Katz submerged in a rippling pool, her hands raised on either side, as though she is finding her balance. Standing on her head is a massive orange and green rooster, outlined in painted-red pieces of rice. At this point in her career, Katz’s frequently cited image of a cock presents itself as quoting her previous work. It’s no longer a sincere attempt at pointing towards an original symbol. Is Katz balancing under the weight (or burden) of being an artist? Is she poking fun at herself and the inherent ego necessary to create? These questions are no longer at the forefront; the cock can’t help but allude to all of its past versions of itself. Katz seems to be experimenting with how long one can apply the same symbols before their edges dull, when a quotation itself becomes the reference point, and the original meaning grows distant. In this way, and in a very broad sense, Burden can be read as a meditation on the instability of meaning.

Allison Katz
*Burden*, 2026
Oil and rice on linen, 220 x 130 x 3.6 cm / 86 5/8 x 51 1/8 x 1 3/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

These ideas reach their apex in the following room. Allusion Cuts, a near-homonym of Allison Katz, layers different scenes into a single composition. The central image is a self-portrait from an advertisement Katz did for Miu Miu, overlaid with a hen and a bird, a badminton shuttlecock, and oranges sprawled across the ground. Katz presents another self-portrait, one that’s based on an image made for circulation. Placed alongside more cock references, Katz reaches the peak of her self-referential investigation. She turns her own image into a quotation, something that can be confused for the real person it represents. Mirroring the obfuscation between Allusion Cuts and Allison Katz, the woman in the Miu Miu ad might look like Katz herself, but it feels more like The Treachery of Images.

Outta The Bag is on view through July 24 at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster St, New York.

In ‘Westward Ho!’ Allison Katz creates a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, her own past, and the coincidences that gather around her. The title firmly locates us, with tongue-in-cheek undertones, inside Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, California. It was Katz’s specific request to exhibit here, in a desire to engage with its associated cultural mythologies: ‘Hollywood is a big picture and I should like to know what it means to walk the walk, or drive the drive, of the Pacific coast, with its last–resort, up to the edge, atomized light...if this is the birthplace of the silver screen, then it’s a chance to test out painting’s irrefutable material and impure surface, its porous consciousness...’ The title blends historical and literary allusions, tracing back originally to the calls made by Elizabethan ferryman as they navigated the River Thames in search of passengers. As Katz writes: ‘I’m using Westward Ho! as a call out, a whoop of exuberance, a question hollered across time and tradition to see who and what answers, as if to test the idea that painting is a conversation.’

Throughout the exhibition Katz deploys a constantly evolving set of techniques and source materials. Echoes, rhymes and serendipities erupt; meaning is reordered and unexpected genealogies converge. ‘West’ is the neighborhood in which the gallery is located, the direction Katz’s apartment faces in London, a catch-all term for a geopolitical system in the midst of being challenged, and an alias for the pastoral patch of English countryside where she worked in residence (the West Country). While preparing for the exhibition she also visited the ruins of Pompeii (in the context of the institutional program Pompeii Commitment), where the discovery of wall paintings buried under ash continues to play a central role in the origin story of Western figuration.