Allison Katz Brings New York Back Into Focus at Hauser & Wirth
Allison Katz’s return to Manhattan arrives as a show about looking, remembering, and reentering a city that never quite leaves the canvas. At Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street location, “Outta the Bag” marks the Canadian artist’s first solo exhibition in Manhattan in more than a decade, and it places New York at the center of her painterly vocabulary.
Katz moved to New York in 2006 to attend Columbia’s MFA program, where she studied with Amy Sillman and Charline von Heyl. Her first New York solo show, “L’Tit” at Uffner & Liu in 2010, earned cautious praise before she relocated to London in 2013. Since then, she has built a practice that moves fluidly between personal memory, institutional history, and the unstable logic of images.
That approach is especially clear in First Impression (2026), a painting that opens onto a reimagined installation view of “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh,” the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural exhibition in 1929. Katz has said that making the work required her to reproduce the archival image at a small scale, even painting a Van Gogh with a tiny brush. The result is less a quotation than a meditation on artistic inheritance — on how one hand seems to reach toward another across time.
The exhibition extends that idea through works tied to New York itself. Lack of Analysis (2026) and Earth Room Fairy (2026) reference Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, the landmark SoHo installation made of 250 cubic yards of dirt. Marginalia (2026) turns to a Central Park West apartment view Katz once watched while cat-sitting for six months, while Big Bite (after Cranach) (2026) zooms in on a detail from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve (1528), isolating Eve’s hand and the apple it holds.
Across the exhibition, Katz treats the city as a layered archive of interiors, facades, and art-historical echoes. Her recent exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario have similarly linked painting to place, but “Outta the Bag” feels especially intimate in its return to Manhattan. It is a show about how a city enters the body, and how painting can make that pressure visible again.
