Allison Katz
I can’t remember a time when contemporary art in London was as shapeshifting and multifarious as it is today. There have been times when certain media or approaches seemed off the menu or beyond the pale, when certain groups held sway. But in 2022, increasingly, anything goes, and often within individual practices: among the six artists introduced here, Phoebe Collings-James, Vlatka Horvat and Yarli Allison are performers and makers, their practices happily drifting between whatever medium fits. These are my artists to watch in 2022: a smattering of bright young things, like Rachel Jones and Collings-James, alongside those who’ve steadily made great work for years, like Samson Kambalu and Allison Katz. They testify to the ongoing strength of the art being made in this city, whatever is being thrown at its artists.
Allison Katz
Katz was in the Hayward Gallery’s recent exhibition Mixing It Up, and amid that show of 31 other painters, was a distinctive and quirky voice, which makes her Camden Art Centre show, her first solo exhibition in a London public space, a mouthwatering prospect. And, like Rachel Jones, mouths are one of the Canadian-born, London-based artist’s many recurring subjects: gaping ones, with teeth and gums as frames for sundry other images. Among her other frequent motifs are cockerels, monkeys and cabbages. Katz is a latter-day Surrealist, with a knack for the unsettling meeting of objects and sentient beings, a flair for the absurd. And then there’s her materials: Katz regularly uses rice amid the paint, for instance. She’s a true original.
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