Allison Katz, Camden Art Centre, London, 2022. Photo: Eva Herzog

Allison Katz

  • 3 January – 2 July 2023

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is delighted to welcome Allison Katz as our artist-in-residence in January 2023.

Over the past decade, Katz has investigated the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, commodity culture, information systems and art history. Her diverse imagery, including cocks, cabbages, mouths, fairies, elevators, noses, waterways, and variations on her own name, appear as recurring symbols and icons which build an unending constellation of ideas and references. Images transmute across the media of painting, posters, ceramics and installations. It is through this act of returning to, copying, transforming and reshaping motifs that the artist creates a lineage and continuity from one work to another, informing and connecting the totality with each new appearance.

Katz lives and works in London, UK. She studied Fine Art at Concordia University in Montreal and received her MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2008. Katz received widespread critical recognition for her first traveling UK solo exhibition ‘Artery’ at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021 and Camden Art Centre in 2022. Her work was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022, ‘The Milk of Dreams,’ curated by Cecilia Alemani. Since June 2022, Katz has been participating in Pompeii Commitments, a research project and artistic residency at the archaeological site in Italy, which runs until July 2023. Katz’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, featuring new work, will take place in fall 2023 in Los Angeles.

‘Allison is among a compelling new generation of artists bringing forward fresh energy in the medium of painting. She is an assured innovator whose work derives power from its unique combination of intellectual rigor with a signature element of wit. She draws on a deep knowledge of art history and her own personal visual lexicon to explore an astounding breadth of ideas, often creating enigmas that stay with us and make us think.’—Manuela Wirth, Hauser & Wirth President