Allison Katz: Muse with a Short Fuse

The exhibition forms the third part of a trilogy that began in January 2018 with Katz’s first institutional exhibition in North America, “Diary w/o Dates” (Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada, traveling to the List Centre at MIT, Boston, US in May 2018), followed by “Period”, on view from September to November 11, 2018 at Gió Marconi Gallery, Milan.

All three exhibitions have as their central preoccupation the expression of time, as both a motif and subtext in painting. “Muse with a Short Fuse” expands on the durational element inherent to painting’s imagery and context by exploring one of it’s longest-standing myths, that of inspiration as wrought by a Muse. Since antiquity, the figure of the (always female) muse was said to gift divine ideas to the (always male) artists whom she favoured. The persistence of the Muse as an external presence has been consistent right up the abject but saintly Venal Muse by Baudelaire in 1857 to the sarcastic Amused Muse of René Daniëls in the 1980s.