Allison Katz

This adventure is presided over by the figure of Gradiva, who is featured in five paintings on display.* Appearing as both muse and creator, she serves as the connective thread for all of the work in the exhibition. Gradiva, meaning “woman stepping forward,” is the fictional name given by an archeologist to a Roman bas-relief of a woman walking in Wilhelm Jensen’s eponymous 1903 novella. In the story, the woman in the bas-relief haunts the archeologist’s dreams and waking hours until he realizes her gait reminds him of a childhood friend. Jensen’s novel profoundly inspired psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and, later, the Surrealists, who understood Gradiva as an example of how creativity can repress, sublimate and ultimately release deep truths about the human heart.

If, for Freud, psychology is akin to archeology in its unearthing of the complex layers of the mind, for Katz, painting additionally encodes a reversal of this process. The surface reveals as much as it layers and disguises. The artist’s incorporation of sand and rice into her paintings infuses them with a tactile dimension that heightens the physical and metaphorical layering in her practice.

Inspired by Gradiva, who transcends time and space, Katz invites visitors to traverse new thresholds and embrace the interconnected pathways and arteries, fictions and dreams that shape the construct we call “self.”

*One of the Gradiva works will cross the threshold of the exhibition gallery and be installed elsewhere in the Museum. Visitors will be encouraged to seek her out.