Warning: this show will mess with your mind – in a good way
Allison Katz: Artery Camden Art Centre, London NW3 ★★★★★
‘Painting”, according to Georges Seurat, “is the art of hollowing a surface out”. Like many a general insight, it’s so accurate that it’s easy to overlook, but few exhibitions have recalled Seurat’s words with as much élan as this. “Artery” by the Canadian artist Allison Katz is a group of disparate paintings (the majority finished in the past two years) that mess with the viewer’s impression of depth.
There’s a trompe l’oeil view of an open lift; a nature scene covered in snapshots of apparently miscellaneous things; and a sacred heart, blazing aloft and framed by dancing monkeys.
These 24 paintings have no single subject or topic. So, in trying to understand what they’re about, you first notice that they dwell on a few motifs. One cockerel – The Cockfather – has shrunk into a living platter, carrying a trio of eggs. Another one – Stage Cock – is a colourful porcelain bird, either pecking the ground or receiving applause. Posterchild is a collage, carefreely done, of faces, rivers, buildings, and details pinched from nearby works. Then there are five still lifes from an ongoing series, each one depicting a cabbage beside the shadow of a male face. Given the midribs and veins of the leaves, these are the most literally linked of Katz’s works to her exhibition title.
Yet they are also, by some distance, the least lively paintings here. Katz is best when she’s egoistic, assembling figures and objects with which she can toy like a mischievous child. In M.A.S.K. – or “Ms Allison Sarah Katz” – she repaints a 2021 Miu Miu advert, which featured herself with a pale pink clutch, then she surrounds it with teeth and lips, as though we were looking out from the artist’s mouth.
And yet the same Ms Katz is centrestage: both creator and superstar. Akgraph (Tobias + Angel) is differently playful, a study in irreverence. It reimagines a 15th-century altar painting by the Italian artist Andrea del Verrocchio, then floats Katz’s face across the two figures, her features sketched as the letters “m”, “a”, “s” and “k”.
This may all sound self-involved, but “Artery” has more serious purpose than you initially realise. You’re made to focus on connections, and figuring out how, and why, they existed in Katz’s mind. The exhibition wants to engage in a visual game with itself, and you. A few metres behind the Stage Cock, a slinky Alley Cat – Katz’s old nickname – looks ready to pounce.
The duo 2020 (Ephemeral) and 2020 (Femoral) depict the same tangle of naked limbs, and the same blank ovals on top, but they swap their smooth and sand-roughened sections, and their colour palettes as well. On the other side of the wall to the painting of the open lift (Elevator III) is the real lift that brought the paintings up to the gallery.
There is no grand thesis or statement here: instead, these artworks are intriguing representations of a creative mind on the go. In lesser hands, this might have been tiresome – art about making art. But thanks to Katz’s imagination, the show is that rare thing: continuous fun.