Allison Katz
Foundations
Opening: Thursday, October 2, 2025; 6pm-9pm
October 3 – November, 2025
From Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm
On 2 October 2025, Gió Marconi will open Foundations, an exhibition by Allison Katz, featuring Edna Katz Silver.
In this new presentation, one of the most prominent names in contemporary painting breaks apart the myth of the artist and her containment as an autonomous voice. To do so, Katz invites her paternal grandmother, the nonagenarian artist Edna Katz Silver, to include a suite of dynamic needlework made over the last decade as integral to her display. “Taking a closer look at what has been there all along in my mind,” she explains, “I invited Edna to share in this ‘solo’ show with me, realising a reciprocal exchange that began nearly a decade ago when I first asked her to make a needlepoint composition based on my signature.”
An integral motif in many of her paintings, Katz’ signature serves as an important iconographic key to the exhibition, and her work in general; a tenuous clue intended to help examine which traits of her biographical past have passed on, accidentally or deliberately, into her art.
Katz also implicates her longtime gallerist, Gió Marconi into her line of enquiry. Through imagery appropriated from scarves and frames crafted by Marconi’s ancestors – a lineage of picture-framers and scarf makers turned art dealers – she raises questions concerning inherited taste, vocation, and social standing. Moreover, for Katz, the frame and the ornament are not merely chance biographical references, but an opportunity to speak of what is foundational to painting. “The outline of the frame comprises the first four lines of any picture”, she explains. “To frame is to cut off endlessness, extract the texture of life from the continuum.” The same applies to the ‘arabesque’ format of the decorative scarf, drawn only in the margins or borders, encircling and teasing, or leaving blank, the centre.
Layering a wide range of inspirational sources, including personal photographic materials, word plays, memories, and references from across modern visual culture, Katz’ new paintings extend beyond the limits of a painted family tree. They are a meditation on the fundamental conditions of painting. “There is no such thing as a blank canvas”, she explains. “Something is always already there, beginning with the unconscious (the ineffable). Then comes the building blocks of our DNA, structural conditions, the bodies of loved ones, the ghosts of those who left. All these forces lead one to form their pleasures and fears; a self-portrait in a sense, not made by the self. Foundations are our beginnings, rooted below ground – and it is the same term (in English at least) for what might happen at the end, with the construction of a legacy.”
Foundations is a varied, interconnected and intergenerational gathering of new work. As ever, Katz uses the stage of an exhibition as an opportunity to create a new body of work and compose a hang that invites new connections and fresh interpretations. The location, architecture and situation of an exhibition are integral to her process, expanding her existing rich lexicon of motifs by tapping into sources that are both found (architectural and archival elements) and otherwise invisible (social and personal). In Foundations Katz revisits some of her established and recognisable motifs in new guises, alongside forays into entirely new materials: bronze, printed silk posters and hand-made artist frames, created in collaboration with her own father.