In Conversation: Allison Katz and Suzanne Hudson

To celebrate the opening of ‘Allison Katz. Westward Ho!,’ the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, please join us for a conversation between artist Allison Katz and art historian Suzanne Hudson.  

In ‘Westward Ho!’ Katz creates a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, her own past, and the coincidences that gather around her. Firmly locating us, with tongue-in-cheek undertones, inside the gallery in West Hollywood (WeHo), California, the title is also a linguistic inquiry into embedded ideas about expansion, journeying, femininity and the existential drive to create. ‘Westward Ho!’ is Katz’s first Los Angeles exhibition and follows her participation in ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani.

The conversation will be followed by a public opening reception from 6 – 8 pm.

This event is free; however, reservations are required. Click here to register.  

About Allison Katz 
For over a decade, London–based artist Allison Katz has investigated the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, commodity culture, information systems and art history. Her diverse imagery, including cocks, cabbages, mouths, fairies, elevators, noses, waterways, and variations on her own name, appear as recurring symbols and icons which build an unending constellation of ideas and references. Images transmute across the media of painting, posters, ceramics and installations. It is through this act of returning to, copying, transforming and reshaping motifs that the artist creates a lineage and continuity from one work to another, informing and connecting the totality with each new appearance. ‘I paint like I write, that is, I build around quotes, which is a conversation, in effect,’ says Katz. Her subjects are united by a curiosity for how an image passes through embodied experience, while its elasticity of meaning is shaped by impersonal, cultural conditions through time. In this way her work addresses the ambiguity of subjectivity and its presentation. 

About Suzanne Hudson  
Suzanne Hudson is professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she was also recently named faculty fellow in the Society of Fellows. Hudson is an art historian and critic whose research spans the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries with special emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting within art schools and alternative pedagogical institutions, which include spaces of care work and medical and psychological services. A regular contributor to Artforum since 2004, she has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. She is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press, 2009; 2011), Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT Press, 2017), and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson in the World of Art series, 2021), and is the co-editor of Contemporary Art: 1989–Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). She is currently working on a book titled ‘Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process.’