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Allison Katz. Outta the Bag marks the Montreal-born, London-based artist’s first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York, a city bound closely to her formation as an artist. Katz moved there two decades ago to undertake her MFA at Columbia University, later living and working in the city for seven formative years.
The exhibition finds Katz deepening her long-standing inquiry into the elasticity of painting and its ability to record, absorb and transmit experience. Across the works on view, wit and lived observation move through art-historical reference, forms of self-portraiture and reflections on the instability of an image-saturated culture.
Language is central to that undertaking. Through wordplay, idiom and elliptical titles, beginning with the exhibition’s own, Katz constructs verbal structures that are open-ended enough to hold both intellectual density and comic slippage. In her hands, meaning rarely settles. It shifts, doubles back and quietly directs the viewer through the work.
In Outta the Bag, framing operates not only as a visual device but as a conceptual armature. Architectural openings, bodily thresholds and painterly conventions draw attention to the conditions through which images are seen, processed and understood. In Jaws (2026), Katz places an interior view of The Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural 1929 exhibition inside a wide-open mouth, a recurring motif in her work.
Allison KatzThe image turns on a productive tension. One-point perspective arranges the museum interior with disciplinary clarity, almost as a mechanism for tidying vision, while the biomorphic mouth that encloses it resists such order. Hunger and consumption become metaphors for looking. The museum, like the digestive system, appears as a site where objects are taken in, broken down and transformed. Perspective, in this context, is far from neutral. It becomes an ideological structure, imposing formal order on the unruly, embodied nature of perception.
A different kind of imbalance animates Burden (2026), in which a flamboyant rooster perches on the head of a partially submerged figure in a pool. At once elaborate and faintly absurd, the painting extends Katz’s ongoing use of the cock motif into a self-portrait that feels both theatrical and unstable. Since 2011, she has drawn on images of cockerels in her so-called cock paintings, using the bird to test and parody the codes of masculinity.
Here, the rooster serves as emblem, counterpart and alter ego, tipping the composition towards comic excess. The title adds pressure. The work becomes something to carry, suggesting both the inherited weight of painting’s history and the strain of sustaining an image, an identity or an idea.
Elsewhere, Katz draws from a personal archive of photographs, family histories, urban views and the ordinary residue of daily life. These materials are assembled through association rather than sequence, reflecting her interest in compilation as a non-hierarchical method. Painting, for Katz, is trans-temporal: a medium in which fragments from different times, places and registers can be brought together to produce something newly alive. Biography, site, chance encounter and painterly invention all meet on the same surface.
What emerges in Outta the Bag is a proposition for painting as a medium especially capable of holding contradiction and multiplicity within a single, shifting field of vision. Looking, in these works, cannot be separated from the frame that organises it or the body that performs it.
As part of Hauser & Wirth’s global Learning programme, Katz will also collaborate with a group of teenage students from Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, a partner of The Drawing Center, alongside Manuela Restaurant, on a community-based poster campaign. Taking Katz’s poster-making process as a point of departure, the students will create original works to be wheatpasted across SoHo in support of the New York non-profit Project EATS.
Born in Montreal in 1980, Katz lives and works in London. She studied fine arts at Concordia University before completing her MFA at Columbia University in 2008. Her first travelling UK solo exhibition, Artery, presented at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021 and Camden Art Centre in 2022, brought broad critical attention, with the accompanying catalogue published in 2023. Her work was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. In 2022, she was a Fellow of Pompeii Commitments, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii’s first contemporary art programme.
In 2024, she curated and appeared in the major group exhibition In the House of the Trembling Eye at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado. Institutional solo exhibitions have also been presented by Kunstverein Freiburg, the MIT List Center for the Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Katz will also open a forthcoming solo exhibition, Jeu d’esprit, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in October 2026, extending the momentum of a practice that continues to test what painting can do, and how far it can carry thought, memory and sensation.
©2026 Hauser & Wirth
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