Allison Katz, Masking (Profile), 2021

To accompany the exhibition Allison Katz: 'Artery' (2021), the artist made two special artists ’editions.

Masking (Profile) was created as a print, overlaid with a delicate paper cut-out. This collaged element is inspired by the intricate and ephemeral Chinese paper cut outs, collected by the artist’s mother and given to her by her uncle after travels to China in the 1960s. These cut outs, depicting characters from the Chinese Operatic tradition, were traditionally affixed to windows at festivals to adorn them, then allowed to weather over time and fall off.

The title of the work is a play on the artist’s initials (Ms. Allison Sarah Katz - M.A.S.K.) and also the self-portrait - as projected persona or theatre. In a literal sense, to mask is to layer over, and masking tape is the material with which to stick things down.

The mask arrives onto the background image, fluttering across the paper and alighting temporarily, finding itself suddenly part of a pre-existing landscape. For Katz, there is a sense of movement across motifs. The work embodies a feeling of transience - as on a stage, in life, constructed identities can be taken on and off. These prints, reproduced from recent drawings, play with games of subjectivity. Noses, head-on or in profile, like masks, can be made to stand in as a surrogate for the whole, imagined identities are doodled or concealed by the edges of the page, providing a partial view, masked.

All profits raised from the sale of this limited-edition work support Nottingham Contemporary’s free programme of exhibitions, educational activities and research programmes.

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For more than a decade, Allison Katz has been exploring painting's relationship to questions of identity and expression, selfhood and voice. Animated by a restless sense of humour and curiosity, her works articulate a tricky language of recurring forms – roosters, monkeys and cabbages, among other things – that are by turns familiar and enigmatic. Katz's paintings, as well as her ceramics and posters, are frequently bodily (full of noses and gaping mouths) and relentlessly wordy, thick with puns and allusions. What emerges from these multi-layered works is a sustained and critical pursuit of what the artist has called “genuine ambiguity”.

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