Artist & Curator Walkthrough: Allison Katz & Cecilia Alemani

On the occasion of ‘Allison Katz. Outta the Bag,’ the Montreal-born, London-based artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York, please join us for a walkthrough with artist Allison Katz and Cecilia Alemani Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art.
‘Allison Katz. Outta the Bag,’ extends Katz’s inquiry into the capaciousness of painting—what it can record, absorb and transmit. Wryness and personal memory intersect with art-historical citations, modes of self-portraiture and allusions to the precarity of an image saturated world. Language, too, operates as a structuring device. Through wordplay, expressions and elliptical titles––beginning with the exhibition’s, which reminds us that showing one’s work is a bit like revealing a secret––Katz creates verbal frames elastic enough to hold both the playful and the erudite, allowing meaning to slip, collide and subtly steer the viewer’s path through the work.
This event is free, however, reservations are recommended.
About Allison Katz
For over a decade, 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 Cecilia Alemani
Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York. In 2025, she curated Once Within A Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, which for the first time in the biennial's history extended its presentation across fourteen partner institutions and unconventional venues across the city of Santa Fe. From 2020 to 2022, she served as the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, which was visited by over 800,000 visitors. She previously served as the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

Photo of Allison Katz by Amy Gwatkin. Photo of Cecilia Alemani by Liz Ligon. Courtesy The High Line.

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