Allison Katz “Outta the Bag” at Hauser & Wirth

Allison Katz opens “Outta the Bag” at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street gallery in New York on April 30, running through July 24, 2026. The exhibition marks the Montreal-born, London-based painter’s first solo show with Hauser & Wirth in New York — the city where she arrived twenty years ago to pursue her MFA at Columbia University and where she spent seven formative years living and working before relocating to London. Across the show, Allison Katz extends her inquiry into what painting can record, absorb, and transmit, working through art-historical citation, self-portraiture, wordplay, and the material residue of daily life to propose painting as a medium uniquely capable of holding disparate registers within a single, shifting field of vision.

Framing as Motif and Structure in Allison Katz’s New Paintings

In “Outta the Bag,” framing devices operate as both a recurring motif and a conceptual structure. Architectural apertures, bodily thresholds, and pictorial conventions draw attention to the conditions under which images are experienced — a line of inquiry that runs through the entire show. In “Jaws” (2026), Allison Katz frames an interior view of The Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural 1929 exhibition within a wide-open mouth, a recurring motif in her work.

The composition holds two systems in productive tension: one-point perspective organizes the museum interior with disciplinary clarity while the biomorphic, ungovernable mouth resists that order. Hunger and consumption become metaphors for looking, and perspective emerges not as a neutral device but as an ideological one that disciplines the embodied nature of perception.

“Burden” (2026) places a flamboyant rooster atop the head of a partially submerged figure in a pool — an elaborate, absurd self-portrait that extends the artist’s long-running cock motif into an improbable pairing. Allison Katz has drawn on images of cockerels since 2011 to play with the codes and postures of masculinity, and here the rooster reads as both emblem and alter ego. The title introduces another layer: the work itself becomes something to bear, evoking the weight of painting’s long history and the imperative of holding something — an image, an idea, a persona — up.

How Allison Katz Builds Her Compositions

Other works in the exhibition draw from the artist’s personal archive — photographs, family histories, cityscapes, and the material residue of daily life — assembled through association rather than chronology. This approach reflects the interest of Allison Katz in compilation as a non-hierarchical process where the trans-temporality of painting unfolds alongside biography, site-specific prompts, and chance encounters. Language operates as a structuring device throughout: through wordplay, expressions, and elliptical titles — beginning with the exhibition’s own title, which reminds us that showing one’s work is a bit like revealing a secret — the artist creates verbal frames elastic enough to hold both the playful and the erudite, allowing meaning to slip, collide, and steer the viewer’s path through the work.

The Career of Allison Katz

Born in Montreal in 1980, Allison Katz studied fine arts at Concordia University before completing her MFA at Columbia in 2008. She received widespread critical recognition for her first traveling UK solo exhibition “Artery” at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021 and Camden Art Centre in 2022. Her work was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani.

In 2022, she became a Fellow of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii’s first contemporary art program. In 2024, she curated and featured in the major group exhibition “In the House of the Trembling Eye” at the Aspen Art Museum. Additional institutional solo exhibitions have been organized by the Kunstverein Freiburg, the MIT List Center for the Arts, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. A forthcoming solo exhibition, “Jeu d’esprit,” opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in October 2026.

Community Programming Around Allison Katz at Hauser & Wirth

As part of Hauser & Wirth’s global Learning program, Allison Katz will collaborate with a teen student group from Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School — a partner of The Drawing Center — and Manuela Restaurant on a community-based poster campaign. Taking the artist’s poster-making process as a starting point, the young artists will create original posters to be wheatpasted across the SoHo neighborhood to raise awareness of the NYC-based nonprofit Project EATS. If you have been following how “Outta the Bag” is a significant addition to Hauser & Wirth’s New York’s 2026 schedule and one of the most anticipated painting exhibitions in the city this spring.

“Outta the Bag” is on view April 30 through July 24, 2026, at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, New York.