A visitor contemplates Elevator III at Allison Katz’s Camden Art Centre exhibition, Artery / Rob Harris
If you stop to think about it, painting is a weird activity. Putting coloured pigment mixed with a medium onto a surface either to describe something, or to express feelings, or make a political or social point is somewhat absurd. It’s also wonderful, of course; a realm only limited by the imagination and, perhaps, technical ability of the painter. And contemporary painting doesn’t get much weirder or more wonderful than in the art of Allison Katz.
The Canadian-born Londoner’s Camden Art Centre show is perplexing and delightful by turns, and thoroughly absorbing. As the punning title of the show, Artery, suggests, Katz is a playful and curious artist. Stylistically, she’s hugely diverse – there’s a huge trompe l’oeil painting of a lift by the entrance to the show but then in another room there’s a cartoonish chicken, with grains of rice on the surface, and a sacred heart in authentically baroque style, surrounded by a frame with a frieze of silhouetted cavorting monkeys.
Katz thinks deeply about images and their effects. There are repeated motifs – monkeys, cockerels, cabbages and open mouths – and off-kilter nods to art history, including quotations from paintings and skewed takes on traditional genres like still life, portraiture and landscape. Also crucial is the way she places her paintings in the space, how they talk to each other.
Her shows are never orthodox. She’s also interested in the presentation of the work beyond the gallery – outside Camden Art Centre is a poster she has designed for the show, which you see again before you enter the exhibition, amid a cluster of other posters she has created for this and other shows, each with distinctive lettering and framing.
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