Though painter Allison Katz lived in New York for seven years, she hasn’t shown in Manhattan for over a decade. Her debut solo show in the city with Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street location offers a major return for the mid-career artist. To mark the occasion, Katz created a suite of New York–centric paintings, featuring the city’s museums and skyscrapers, as well as an ironically small “Big Apple” composition. Her new show, titled “Outta the Bag,” reaffirms her place as a rising star of contemporary painting, equally playful and erudite.
During an interview after the exhibition preview, Katz shared that it felt great to be back. “New York has a very special energy,” she said. “I’ve been working things out elsewhere. And I wanted to come back when I felt ready to say something specific to New York.”
The Montreal-born painter moved to the city in 2006 to attend Columbia’s MFA program, where she studied with painting heavyweights Amy Sillman and Charline von Heyl. Before school, she’d worked as an artists’ model. Afterwards, she assisted Janine Antoni, the performance artist and sculptor. “The best influences make you question your own taste,” Katz said. “I don’t really care what I like. It’s more: Why am I being moved by something? In this world that’s been co-opted by technology, it’s almost transactional to ‘like’ something. I steer away from that. It’s better to go back to a gut instinct or first impression.”
It’s no wonder, then, that Katz has titled one of her new works First Impression (2026). It features a rippling mouth that opens onto her depiction of an installation view of “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh,” the inaugural exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1929.
To make the painting, Katz had to reproduce the artworks in the archival image at small scale, to paint a Van Gogh with a tiny brush. “It was fun, it was crazy,” she said. “In those moments, I understood that you can share a hand with someone else. I often think about that. I don’t always feel like I’m painting alone.”
While First Impression required Katz to explicitly work in other artists’ styles, she also acknowledged that all her work is in dialogue with art history. “When you paint, you’re inserting yourself into a long tradition. Every brushmark is a quote,” she said. Nevertheless, “I feel like I’m ‘becoming’ all the time.”
“Outta the Bag” is a kind of second first impression for Katz, who presented her debut solo show in New York, “L’Tit” at Uffner & Liu, in 2010. It earned positive yet measured reviews in The New Yorker (“free-spirited… promising”) and the New York Times (“spunky…great start”). One suggested Katz narrow her focus, the other to push her stylistic inconsistency further. “I was beginning to figure out how the moment of an exhibition can align with what’s in the paintings,” Katz said. In 2013, the artist moved to London, both for her marriage and because she wanted to push herself to paint somewhere else. With painting, she believes, it’s good to never get too comfortable.
Over the next decade, Katz showed throughout Europe, the U.K., and beyond, often with Milan’s Gió Marconi. In 2022, Hauser & Wirth presented its first exhibition with Katz, “Westward Ho!” in Los Angeles. She staged the major exhibition “In the House of the Trembling Eye” at the Aspen Art Museum in 2024, uniting contemporary artworks with fragments of frescoes from Pompeii, and recently closed “Inner Momentum” at the Art Gallery of Ontario. These days, her shows engage explicitly with their venues via architectural interventions and painterly meditations on the regions in which they’re presented.
In addition to the painting of MoMA’s first show, Katz marks her return to New York with compositions that reference city real estate: Lack of Analysis (2026) and Earth Room Fairy (2026) allude to Walter De Maria’s Earth Room (1977), which comprises 250 cubic yards of dirt in an apartment down the street in SoHo. Marginalia (2026) features a disembodied arm that hovers in front of the expansive exterior of an apartment building on Central Park West, the window-filled view from the apartment where the artist once cat-sat for six months. “I was trying to work out all these stories that were simultaneously happening, while understanding that just as I saw all these people moving, I was one of them too,” the artist said. “My body was totally intertwined with the nervous system of the city.”
One small canvas, Big Bite (after Cranach) (2026) reproduces a detail from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s two-panel piece Adam and Eve (1528). It zeroes in on Eve’s hand, which holds out an apple bearing strange, inhuman bite marks. “What’s he trying to say?” Katz asked. “That the woman is the devil, or inhuman? It made me think of the monstrous and the relationship to the mouth.”
These oral fixations reverberate across Allusion Cuts (2026), an acrylic-and-marble painting at the very back of the show. It’s the only artwork that a casual passerby can see from Wooster Street and, as such, offers another first impression.
The composition features an abstracted pink and black mouth that encircles two overlaid images: one, of the artist sitting dutifully with her hands in her lap in front of a white wall, the other of a semi-transparent, upside-down rooster. It stands on a circular structure which, given the overlay, resembles a platter serving up the artist’s head.
The reference image for Allusion Cuts in fact comes from a printing fluke. Katz was working on “Artery,” her 2023 monograph, and found a printout in the trash that featured two of her paintings overlaid with different saturations. “This is also how memory works,” Katz said. “Some things come through others. This is intrinsic to what paint can uniquely do.”
It’s ironic, then, that the more opaque image in Allusion Cuts is a self-portrait, painted from a photograph that was part of a Miu Miu fashion campaign in which Katz participated. “It was like being put through the machine of self-presentation,” she said. To take her constructed, widely disseminated image back, and transform it into a singular painting, felt like a gift: an opportunity to rework others’ impressions.
“Part of painting’s power is that it doesn’t have to align with the first impression,” Katz said. “It’s allowed to change. You can sit with something and grow to find it.”
