Adele. Allison Katz
Piper Keys, London 1 March- 6 April 2014
Exhibited at Piper Keys - an emerging Whitechapel gallery - is a selection of paintings by Canadian-born, London-based artist Allison Katz. The selection belongs to an ongoing series called Adele, begun in 2011, of Katz's eponymous friend, painted from life. Their style is redolent of German expressionism, but Katz deftly moves across other stylistic registers. Adele is pensive; Adele is blue; Adele meets our gaze, or looks away; Adele is intensely concerned. Katz looks and looks again over a duration of time: things, as we know, look different from one day to the next. These successive actions she likens to keeping a notebook.
An alluring tension emerges between provisionality and permanence, the singular and multiple. Katz's multi-faceted accumulation seems not only to promise psychological insight into the sitter, but the artist too. Plastic push pins splay the upper extremities of the leather hides Katz uses as grounds for her paintings. Loose fronds gather towards the bottom, animating localised areas of the painted body. These hides are off-cuts (cut off the animal body). Their variation in shades of tan, natural and occasionally dyed and printed, and irregular edges are as 'as found'.
There is an unresolved mutualistic relation between these unstretched, unprimed, absorbent grounds and Katz's painting: their textural and tonal qualities express the humanly rendered body, as it expresses the inanimate hide, abstracted from the body. Adele's portraits, Katz says, are offered as recollections and projections. While they are made in reaction to the presence of another, they may also suggest a different place or time - spatial and temporal displacements embodied in the hide.