The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents Jeu d’esprit, Allison Katz’s first solo exhibition at a Quebec museum. Born in Montreal, Katz has won international acclaim and is among the most exciting contemporary painters of her generation. The exhibition, which opened on October 9, features 15 paintings, including eight works created specifically for the occasion; all set within a layout the artist designed for the MMFA.
“The Museum is thrilled and honoured to present Allison Katz’s first major exhibition in Quebec and to highlight the talent of this Montreal-born artist,” stated Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the exhibition curator and the Zhao-Ionescu Chief Curator of the MMFA. “At once playful and deeply reflective, Allison Katz’s work explores the unconscious, coincidence, and the complexities of identity.”
Photo: MMFA / Denis Farley
An exploration of human psyche, memory and materials
Drawing on sources ranging from art history and literature to psychoanalytic theory and popular culture, Katz has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary that probes the human psyche and painting’s infinite possibilities. For her, painting bridges worlds, uniting autobiography and art history, humour and ambiguity, and language and image, while resisting any single meaning.
Katz conceived the gallery layout to reject chronological order in favour of visual and thematic connections, inviting the public to reflect on how memory, coincidence, and influence shape our identity. True to its title, the exhibition unfolds like a game, playing with perception and association. From one painting to the next, motifs transform and take on new meaning. Figures become avatars, signatures and self-portraits. Doors and windows, canals and mouths all offer passages between lived experience and imagination.
Photo: MMFA / Denis Farley
Traces of Gradiva
A central figure in the exhibition is Gradiva, meaning “she who steps forward.” 19th-century German author Wilhelm Jensen created Gradiva as a fictional character based on a Roman bas-relief. She later inspired psychoanalytic literature and Surrealism. Under Katz’s brush, she becomes a contemporary muse who crosses thresholds and connects paintings, reminding us that images, like memories, can always resurface in new forms.
Referenced throughout the exhibition, Gradiva embodies this poetic thread and bears witness to art’s power to transform memory and to unleash buried desires. True to the character’s elusive nature, a painting of Gradiva has ventured beyond the exhibition galleries. Visitors are invited to search for it in the Museum’s permanent collection.
Photo: MMFA / Denis Farley
Born in Montreal in 1980, Katz lives and works in London, UK. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been shown widely in Europe and North America. Most notably, it has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Camden Art Centre, UK; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany.
Her works have also appeared in prestigious group exhibitions, including the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and shows at the Tate Modern and Hayward Gallery in London. In 2024, the artist curated a major exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. In summer 2025, Katz created a billboard for the High Line at 18th Street in New York.
— MMFA
— AB