A recurring subject in Allison Katz’s practice, monkeys playfully adorn this amplified ‘frame’, its traditional function displaced. Katz is constantly looking at and questioning conventions of Western painting, and sees the latter as a continuous conversation between artist and subject, viewer and work. By deconstructing the traditional format of painting, turning the frame – an object whose purpose is decorative and protective – into the artwork itself, she elevates and transforms its status, teasing the prestige of centuries of painters before her.

Deeply inspired by writing and literature; puns and word associations are an integral part of Katz’s oeuvre. She questions, pokes and probes the intricate net that shape our ideas – deconstructing what is preconceived, giving new meaning to the old. Indeed, Katz claims: ‘I prefer to see my paintings as a mirage, which is something I work towards, using certain colours, tones, layers and transparencies. It also begins by considering the four edges of the canvas as the first four lines, active locations, possible entrances and exits’ (A. Katz, in interview with F. Loeffler, in The White Review, September 2015). In Frame, she is activating the margins which are usually used to complement and enhance the central piece, giving the viewer free reign to ‘[pick] up where the hand left off’, as Katz argues that ‘painting has this amazing, vulnerable, open-door policy and quality of permission […] when you look at a painting […] there is nothing stopping you (apart from the law) from carrying on with it’ (A. Katz, in interview with F. Loeffler, in The White Review http://allison-katz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/4.-2015-Katz-White-Review-1.pdf). Much like a theatre prop, the work’s meaning is constantly expanding: by not bordering an artwork, Frame rather opens up a new, constantly evolving, space of interpretation.