ASPEN ART MUSEUM
MAGAZINE
8
Summer Exhibition
Allison Katz’s expansive “In the House of the Trembling Eye” assembles the artist’s dazzling paintings with those from private Aspen collections and special loans including fragments of frescoes from Pompeii. In a theatrical display at the Aspen Art Museum inspired by ancient domestic spaces, the exhibition presents Katz’s vision of painting as “a call and response, a question posed across time.”
HOUSE OF MIRRORS
the idea that painting is a conversation.” The show is titled “In the House of the Trembling Eye”—a poetic phrase that layers (palimpsests? collapses? explodes? melts down and fuses?) associations of the well-known remote mountain town and its trembling deciduous trees with a famous moun- tain and its well-preserved denizens on the other side of the world: the ancient site of Pompeii. Through nine rooms, the trembling eye roves and judders, saunters and alights, keeps looking and looking at painted surfaces of all colors and sizes, textures and ages, following Katz’s intricate web of red threads that stretch between works both ancient and modern, all of which hail from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii or from the private collections of the museum’s near neighbors. In her studio on a chilly Saturday morning in late April, Katz shows
The museum is an exhibition space, an ancient Pompeiian house (“ domus ”), an archaeological site, a contemporary resurrection, a series of mirrors and reections, a mise en abîme, a homage, a conversation, a continuum, a bounded area—with four sides, sometimes more—lled with paintings. This is, in fact, remarkably similar to making a painting and to painting in general: the question of how to organize space. At Aspen Art Museum, Allison Katz has curated (I use the term loosely, as she prefers to call the act a “staging”) a nuanced and astonishingly varied exhibition that oers deep, creatively generous and open-ended proposals about what it means, both in the past and the present, to construct an image. “Painting is for me always a question hollered across time and traditions, to see who and what answers,” Katz said in our recent discussion, “as if to test
Left Allison Katz, Trembling Eye II , 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth
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