Montreal-born, London-based artist Allison Katz makes a witty, playful, and secret-filled return to New York—the city she stepped into twenty years ago for her postgraduate studies and where she spent the most formative seven years of her career. The artist’s debut New York solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Wooster Street, Outta the Bag, questions what painting can record, what it can absorb, and the boundaries of the gaze in a world saturated with images.
Nodding to the English idiom “let the cat out of the bag,” the exhibition title likens an artist opening their work to the viewer to the act of sharing an uncanny secret. Allison Katz’s canvases offer flexible structures woven with puns, personal anecdotes, and art historical references, allowing meaning to constantly shift and collide.
The framing elements within the exhibition operate as both a visual motif and a conceptual structure. Architectural openings, bodily thresholds, and pictorial conventions draw attention to the conditions under which we experience images.
The Unruly Mouth Swallowing MoMA
One of the most striking works in the exhibition, First Impression, directly forces the viewer to reflect on the ideology behind the act of seeing. In this work, Katz imprisons an interior view of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) 1929 inaugural exhibition inside a wide-open mouth—a recurring motif in the artist’s practice.
Utilizing the concepts of hunger and consumption as metaphors for the act of looking, the composition holds two different systems in tension: the single-vanishing-point rational perspective that mechanically organizes the museum interior, and the uncontrollable, biomorphic mouth that surrounds it. If the museum, much like a digestive system, is a space where objects are taken in, processed, and transformed, then perspective here is not a neutral technique, but an ideological order that disciplines the restless nature of perception.
Roosters, Absurdity, and the Weight of Art History
In the work titled Burden, which brings together oil paint and grains of rice on linen canvas, we confront a magnificent, flamboyant rooster trying to balance on the head of a figure half-submerged in a pool.
Since 2011, Katz has used this animal figure in her rooster paintings to play with masculine codes and postures. Here, the rooster acts as both an emblem and an alter ego, dragging the scene into a comical imbalance. The title of the painting adds a new layer to the work: bearing the monumental historical weight of painting, and the obligation to hold an image, an idea, or a persona high above water despite everything.
An Archive Defying Chronology
The artist’s other works feed on a personal archive consisting of photographs, family histories, cityscapes, and the material remains of daily life (enriched with layers of sand and acrylic). Instead of following a chronological order, Katz progresses through associations. This non-hierarchical compilation process brings painting’s capacity to bend time together with biography and chance encounters.
A Poster Campaign Spilling Into the Streets of SoHo
The exhibition also features a beautiful public component that extends beyond the gallery walls. As part of Hauser & Wirth’s global learning program, Allison Katz collaborates with a group of young students from the Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School.
Inspired by Katz’s own poster-making process, the young artists design original posters. These posters will be wheatpasted onto the street walls of the SoHo neighborhood to raise awareness for the benefit of the New York-based non-profit organization Project EATS.
Outta the Bag proves the unique power of painting to hold different layers of perception within a single fluid vision. We highly recommend that all no-26 readers traveling to New York before the end of July track down the posters on the streets of SoHo and drop by this mind-expanding exhibition at Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition Details:
- Venue: Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, New York
- Artist: Allison Katz
- Exhibition Title: Outta the Bag
- Closing Date: July 24, 2026
