Allison Katz’s Showery, 2017, comes to auction on the heels of the artist’s inclusion in The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale and 2022 solo exhibition at the Camden Art Center, London. Her current solo show at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, her first with the gallery, has been eagerly anticipated.
Showery arises from Katz’s exhibition Diary w/o Dates, shown at the Oakville Galleries, Ontario and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2018. The title of the show was drawn from Katz’s interest in the grid of the calendar in relation to the grid of the canvas. Breaking free from the planar structure of the calendar and painting, Katz “warps the organizing principles of time, her paintings simultaneously calling to the past and proposing the future.” In the first iteration of the show, Katz exhibited her work on a 12-sided installation experienced in the round, emphasizing the constant flux of time.
“I prefer to see my painting as a mirage, which is something I work towards, using certain colours, tones, layers and transparencies.”
—Allison Katz
A self-portrait, Showery is from a group of paintings inspired by an eighteenth-century British satire of the names in the French Revolutionary calendar: instead of Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivôse, Pluviôse, the Brits mocked drippy, slippy, nippy, showery, flowery, and so on. “Reading their titles means getting caught in the current of a silly rhyme, the pleasures of language at play,” critic Daniella Sanader has noted. “And reading her paintings within this framework brings new meaning to their content: prompting questions of how women’s bodies stand in as allegories for time — a springtime maiden, a wintry crone—and how we rely upon representation to structure something so vast and wholly unknowable.” In the present example, the trace of the Katz’s own image holding two white birds is emblematic of her symbolic but ambiguous representational choices, characterized by shifting styles and depictions of women and animals. On its surface a signifier of the “showery” onset of spring, the work is a powerful consideration of the arbitrariness of time and allegorical representations of women and nature.
