Allison Katz Outta the Bag

'Allison Katz. Outta the Bag' is the Montreal-born, London-based artist's first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York—the city she moved to 20 years ago to obtain her MFA at Columbia University, and where she then lived and worked for seven formative years. Across the exhibition, Katz extends her inquiry into the capaciousness of painting—what it can record, absorb and transmit. Wit and lived experience ripple through art-historical citations, modes of self-portraiture and allusions to the precarity of an image-saturated world. Language, too, operates as a structuring device. Through wordplay, expressions and elliptical titles—beginning with the exhibition's, which reminds us that showing one's work is a bit like revealing a secret—Katz creates verbal frames elastic enough to hold both the playful and the erudite, allowing meaning to slip, collide and subtly steer the viewer's path through the work. In 'Outta the Bag,' framing devices operate both as a motif and conceptual structure: architectural apertures, bodily thresholds and pictorial conventions call attention to the conditions under which images are experienced. In 'Jaws' (2026), Katz has framed an interior view of The Museum of Modern Art's inaugural 1929 exhibition within a wide-open mouth—a recurring motif in her oeuvre. Invoking hunger and consumption as metaphors for looking, the composition holds two systems in tension: the one-point perspective organizes the museum interior as a kind of mechanistic intervention—a cleaning-up of the visual field—set against the biomorphic, ungovernable mouth that contains it. If the museum, like the digestive tract, is a space through which things are taken in, processed and transformed, then perspective here is not neutral but ideological: a formal order that disciplines the restless, embodied nature of perception. Meanwhile, in 'Burden' (2026) a flamboyant rooster balances atop the head of a partially submerged figure in a pool. Elaborate and absurd, this self-portrait extends Katz's long-running cock motif into an improbable pairing where animal and human form a precarious counterpart. Katz has drawn upon images of cockerels for her 'cock paintings' since 2011, using the bird to play with the codes and postures of masculinity. Here, the rooster reads as both emblem and alter ego, its theatrical presence pushing the scene toward a kind of comic imbalance. The title introduces another layer: the work itself becomes something to bear, evoking both the weight of painting's long history and the imperative of holding something—an image, an idea, a persona—up. Other works draw from Katz's personal archive—photographs, family histories, cityscapes and the material residue of daily life—assembled through association rather than chronology. This approach reflects the artist's interest in compilation as a non-hierarchical process in which the trans-temporality of painting—the combining of parts to make something entirely new––unfolds alongside biography, site-specific prompts and chance encounters. 'Outta the Bag' proposes painting as a medium uniquely capable of holding disparate registers within a single, shifting field of vision—where looking is inseparable from both the frame that makes it possible and the body that enacts it.