KATZ, Allison
Artery

London-based Canadian artist Allison Katz has been exploring painting’s relationship to questions of identity and expression, selfhood and voice, for more than a decade. Animated by a restless sense of humor, her works articulate what the artist has called a “genuine ambiguity.”

Artery—a book that situates itself somewhere between a monograph, exhibition catalog, and an artist’s book—is an exploration of what is within and below. The book features 50 full-color image plates of the artist’s work and 150 reference images; it includes essays from Sam Thorne, former director of Nottingham Contemporary; Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre; and Katz, herself.

Interspersed with text and paintings, every series of four pages of the book fold out into a poster-sized print of a piece of Katz’s work. “The paintings are embedded into the pages, and those posters are folded inside like caves. You have to stop reading about them to open the page, experience the painting, fold it back up, then resume your reading. Or you can read straight through, never even realizing what lies beneath the pages” (Katz). The artist intends for the reader to experience the text of the book and the posters inside as separate entities, even though they are about one another. Language, Katz argues, cannot speak for painting and painting cannot reproduce language. They are parallel but related events.

[publisher's note]

Published by MIT Press, 2023
Design by Studio Mathias Clottu
Monographs / Painting