Books
What I’m Reading: Allison Katz
Allison Katz on Flood Tide
Photo: Amy Gwatkin
Ahead of Allison Katz’s public conversation with poet Ariana Reines at the Warburg Institute in London on April 21—marking the UK launch of Katz’s In the House of the Trembling Eye—the artist shares what’s on her bookshelf in Ursula’s latest “What I’m Reading” column.
“Ana Schnabl’s Flood Tide (2025) was given to me at the start of the winter by the artist and publisher Camilla Wills, whose own press, Divided, had just released it. It instantly changed my sleeping patterns, kickstarting a ritual of reading at bedtime and resetting my dreams. Brutal and addictive, the book made me long for its night-shadiness during the day. The Slovenian setting, language games, oddball characters and psychological-mystery puzzle of a plot took me out of my own head and into my unconscious, making me laugh and feel sad at the same time.
My morning reading is guided by the chance of meeting the art historian Cordula Grewe and receiving her book, The Arabesque from Kant to Comic Books (Routledge, 2024). She traces the development of the German Romantic “self” via curlicue scrolls and neurotic flourishes in the margins, irrepressible flashes of reality within art’s constraints. Both erudite and entertaining, her writing has connected me to the arabesque in my own work and repositioned the digressive as the site of true meaning.
The afternoon is spent with the artist Nick Mauss’s Dispersed Events: Selected Writings (After8 Books, 2024). I admire the way Mauss writes without hierarchy, opening up connective tissue across forms with a unique take and touch.”
—Katz
Cover of Allison Katz, In the House of the Trembling Eye
–
Allison Katz’s solo exhibition “Outta the Bag” opens on April 30 at Hauser & Wirth New York’s Wooster Street location.
Allison Katz approaches painting as a living language, one that absorbs autobiography, art history and the visual tensions of the present moment. Her diverse imagery appears as recurring signs that form a constellation of ideas and references, transmuting them across the mediums of painting, posters, ceramics and installation.
On April 21, to mark the UK launch of the book In the House of the Trembling Eye, artist Allison Katz and poet Ariana Reines will engage in a public dialogue at the Warburg Institute in London. Their conversation will take volcanic eruptions and Warburgian philosophy as starting points to address creativity, art history and personhood in their own work. This event is presented in collaboration with the Aspen Art Museum, and is kindly supported by Ursula magazine. Free registration for the event can be found here.