Allison Katz

Allison Katz was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1980. She studied fine arts at Concordia University in Montreal, earning a BFA in 2002, before moving to New York to pursue an MFA at Columbia University, completed in 2008. She lived and worked in New York for a period after completing her MFA before relocating to London, where she currently lives and works.

Katz's paintings interweave language, self-reference, and repeated motifs including recurring poster formats, working across metaphor and wordplay rather than a single fixed meaning. Her traveling exhibition Artery, which originated at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021 and moved to Camden Art Centre in London in 2022, was her first institutional solo show in the United Kingdom. Earlier solo presentations included the Kunstverein Freiburg and the ICA Studio in London in 2015, and her first solo exhibition in the United States, Diary w/o Dates, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2018.

Her institutional profile expanded significantly in the 2020s. In 2022 her work appeared in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale. In 2023 she was awarded, according to gallery and museum materials, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which included a major solo presentation, Inner Momentum, running from 2025 to 2026, and she became a fellow of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii's contemporary art program. In 2024 she curated In the House of the Trembling Eye at the Aspen Art Museum, pairing her own work with more than a hundred contemporary works and Roman frescoes from Pompeii. She is currently represented by Hauser & Wirth, with a 2026 solo exhibition, Outta the Bag, at Hauser & Wirth's New York gallery, and an upcoming survey, Jeu d'esprit, opening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in October 2026.

Critical attention has followed Katz's rapid move from project-based exhibitions to major museum platforms, with writers consistently pointing to her use of wordplay, allusion, and recurring formats such as posters and self-referential imagery rather than fixed, literal meaning. Writing on her 2021 to 2022 traveling exhibition Artery, Ocula Advisory characterized the paintings as figurative in a loose sense while resisting a single fixed meaning, emphasizing metaphor, wordplay, and allusion instead. Her selection for the 2022 Venice Biennale, the 2023 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and her invitation to guest-curate a Pompeii-linked exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in 2024 have reinforced a critical consensus that treats her as a significant painter of her generation, with institutions increasingly giving her latitude to shape exhibitions on her own curatorial terms.

Katz's market is still primarily a primary market, carried by her gallery Hauser & Wirth, rather than a long resale history. Her auction high is Snowglobe, which sold for approximately USD 354,637 at Christie's, London, on 13 October 2023 (HENI reports the same sale at approximately USD 353,000). Because her public secondary-market history remains limited, collectors should treat any single auction figure for Katz as one data point rather than an established trend.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Katz, and her public auction record, while now anchored by a documented 2023 Christie's sale of Snowglobe, remains small overall. Her market case currently rests on institutional validation, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Venice Biennale inclusion, and a run of museum surveys at the AGO and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, rather than on a long or deep secondary-market history. Collectors should verify any offered work directly through her current gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and treat published auction figures as a thin but growing data set.