‘The shapeshifting and unconscious associations of the fairy realm make an adept analogy to the act of painting.’
—Allison Katz
A recurring motif in her visual vocabulary since 2016, the fairy represents Allison Katz’s interest in how surrogates from other realms stand in for the human condition. As liminal beings, fairies possess the capacity to change size, shape and intention; while in folklore, they have embodied emotional and psychological states such as grief, infatuation, good fortune and madness. In these works, Katz explores the persistence of a folklore tradition, and its relationship to oral history and current technologies.
‘In the House of Menander’ (2023) is the latest incarnation of this motif and finds the fairy inside a Pompeian house. Katz’s fairy is based on footage of a purported sighting in a British garden, caught on CCTV and blown-up several hundred times. The discovery was published in a tabloid website, generating a playful link between archaic beliefs and contemporary channels of fixation. With its obscured face, iridescent wings, and multi-colored limbs, the fairy conveys an intense and watchful gaze, playing with questions of belief, imagination, and illumination. Within the context of Pompeii, Katz explores how the fairy, like painting itself, has the ability to compress time and space and bring the past into the present.
About the artist
For over a decade, Katz has investigated the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, commodity culture, information systems and art history. Her diverse imagery, including cocks, cabbages, mouths, fairies, elevators, noses, waterways, and variations on her own name, appear as recurring symbols and icons which build an unending constellation of ideas and references. Images transmute across the media of painting, posters, ceramics and installations. It is through this act of returning to, copying, transforming and reshaping motifs that the artist creates a lineage and continuity from one work to another, informing and connecting the totality with each new appearance.
Artwork images © Allison Katz. Photo: Damian Griffiths
Portrait of Allison Katz © Allison Katz. Photo: Eva Herzog