Today, the 4th of November, Hauser & Wirth opened ‘Westward Ho!,’ its first solo exhibition with Allison Katz, whose work explores the intersections between autobiography, art history, information systems, and commodity culture.
On view at Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood in Los Angeles, this presentation showcases new paintings, some of which were made during Katz’s recent residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, alongside site-specific reactions to the architecture of the gallery’s 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival building.
In ‘Westward Ho!’ Katz forms a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, personal past, and the coincidences that gather around her. With tongue-in-cheek undertones, the title places us inside the gallery in West Hollywood (WeHo), California.
Katz intended to exhibit here in an attempt to engage with its associated cultural mythologies: “Hollywood is a big picture, and I should like to know what it means to walk the walk, or drive the drive, of the Pacific coast, with its last–resort, up to the edge, atomized light…if this is the birthplace of the silver screen, then it’s a chance to test out painting’s irrefutable material and impure surface, its porous consciousness.”
The exhibition runs from the 4th of November, 2023, until the 5th of January, 2024.