”Painting is like a river flowing.”
We visited Canadian painter Allison Katz in her London studio and spent the day exploring her work across several pieces simultaneously.
“For me, painting is one of the few activities where one can experience multiple times
simultaneously. So, there is a feeling that the surface of the painting can hold these different times: The present as it’s being made; a past that I may not be so conscious of; and a future that I don’t have actually to think about, but that is still there.”
“I once compared painting to a game of boule where you’re hitting one ball with another, and then you’re changing the position of the other ball. And that’s certainly what I aim for by painting on so many things at once in the studio, paintings that are markedly different superficially but were made at the same time. And then together they do make a whole.”
“I use sand and rice, and sometimes metallic pigments. I also use different kinds of linen,
a thick weave or a very fine weave. I use acrylic, I use oil. So, all these choices help to bring something different out into the image. And I want the surface of the painting to be the most real encounter, that whatever illusion, whatever I’m painting is interrupted by the surface so that the viewer is constantly moving between the real and the imaginary.”
Allison Katz was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1980. She currently lives and works in London, England. She studied fine arts at Concordia University in Montreal and received her MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2008.
Katz received widespread critical recognition for her first traveling UK solo exhibition, ‘Artery’, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021 and Camden Art Center in 2022, with the accompanying exhibition catalog released in 2023. Her work was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. In 2022, Katz was a Fellow of Pompeii Commitments, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii’s first contemporary art program. In 2024, Katz curated and featured in the major group exhibition ‘In the House of the Trembling Eye’ at the Aspen Art Museum, CO. Additional institutional solo exhibitions of her work have been organized by the Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany; MIT List Center for the Arts, Cambridge, MA; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Katz has a forthcoming solo exhibition, ‘Jeu d’esprit,’ at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada, opening in October 2026.
Allison Katz was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in her London studio in February 2026.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edit: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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