Allison Katz, AKgraph (Illuminated), 2014-2016
Allison Katz's painting appeared on the cover of the March 2020 issue of Art Monthly.
Slow Painting - Leeds Art Gallery, 25 October to 12 January
AM contributor Martin Herbert - who himself trained in Leeds as a painter - has chosen 19 artists he sees as making 'slow painting'. In Turner Prize manner, they are British-based or British: only the Dublin-based Irish artist Mairead O'hEocha is neither...The show as a whole crowds 57 paintings into three rooms. That's the nature of such surveys, which have to balance the potentially conflicting desires to show lots and to show it well, but it makes for a lively survey. Apart from the matter of speed, the work is united in valuing painting as a means of discovery, rather than as just one possible way to communicate ideas.
Unsurprisingly, Herbert's wall and catalogue texts are engaging explanations of why he chose these artist. Allison Katz, for example, makes humorous and attractive work, but beyond that she "operates in a purposeful conundrum style...We are invited to guess at a personal conection between the artist and her visual materials, and to think we can know something about her as a result; but this, taken with Katz's shape-shifting approach to aesthetics, might all be a deceit, the whole an inquiry into the possibility of expressing selfhood through painting."
Read full article at artmonthly.co.uk