Friday, July 13, 2018

Allison Katz at MIT List Visual Arts Center


(link)

the two subjects to painting, the thing represented in paint and the artist-as-subject rendering both. Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about subject, and Katz's "self-portraits" make this mirror between painter and self-subject anxious by threatening this trust: painting that feel like fibs, competing styles that delay any coherence in its subject, the painter, our trust for the text to tell us something about the author. Others have called them palindromic or Janus-like, expressing this anxiety over the mirror. An irritant in our lenses, the paintings.


Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein,