Galleria Gió Marconi in Milan is hosting, from October 3 through November 2025, the exhibition Foundations by Allison Katz, one of the most relevant Canadian artists on the contemporary painting scene. The opening is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 2, from 6 to 9 p.m., at the venue at 15 Via Tadino. With the new exhibition, Katz pursues a layered reflection on the act of painting as an original gesture, often built on unstable, ambiguous or accidental foundations. The works in the exhibition emerge from a complex web of biographical, genealogical and cultural references, in which family memories, photographic materials, private objects, language games and fragments of modern visual culture are intermingled. The Foundations project is organized around a nucleus of unpublished works from the artist’s recent production, and builds a narrative path that interweaves personal experience with reflection on pictorial language. The autobiographical element is taken as a cue to question established notions of origin, authenticity and inheritance. Painting, in Katz’s vision is a form of visual thought capable of challenging the separations between public and private, symbolic and intimate.
One of the most important aspects of the exhibition is the openness to an intergenerational dialogue involving Edna Katz Silver, the artist’s paternal grandmother, who has been invited to participate with a series of embroidery works made over the past decade. Born more than ninety years ago and active for years with a textile practice developed in the domestic sphere, Edna Katz Silver enters the exhibition not as an ancillary figure, but as an autonomous and authoritative presence capable of establishing deep connections with her granddaughter’s visual investigation. The embroideries on display are visual objects that contribute to the reflection on the creative act as a practice transmitted, learned and transformed over time.
Another recurring element in Foundations is the reference to the figure of gallery owner Gió Marconi, who has been following Katz’s exhibition path for years. The artist makes his figure visually present through a set of images inspired by Marconi’s family history of making handcrafted scarves and frames. The objects, seemingly distant from the world of contemporary painting, become tools for reflecting on the ways in which material and imaginative heritage is transmitted and recoded in the present. The artist’s work thus unfolds as a complex map, in which biographical trajectories connect with the logics of vision and the memory of objects.
Katz’s approach delves into the visual and linguistic codes that structure painting, dismantling its conventions and questioning the most common oppositions: between figuration and abstraction, between subjectivity and symbol, between individual gesture and cultural construction. In Foundations, painting is presented as a place of layering, where each form carries with it a genealogy, an echo or a contamination. The exhibition thus invites us to consider art as a relational phenomenon, made up of shared influences and presences that accumulate over time. In this sense, Foundations takes the form of an investigation into the transmission of affects, languages, materials and visions. It is a reflection on origin, but without nostalgia; rather an exploration of the possibilities that origin itself can be rewritten, interpreted, or questioned.
Allison Katz’s practice has always been characterized by her conscious and ironic use of painting, understood as an open space in which disparate elements can coexist. In Foundations, too, the artist employs linguistic play and incongruous juxtaposition to disorient perception and open up new interpretive possibilities. The exhibition is on view Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., through November 2025.
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| In Milan, Allison Katz investigates family legacy and the origin of painting |
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