Nottingham Contemporary Summer / Autumn 2021
3D Virtual Exhibitions

Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NG1 2GB

Allison Katz: Artery

Titled Artery, Allison Katz's exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary will be the London-based Canadian artist's first institutional solo show in the UK. It is a collaboration with Camden Art Centre, where it will open in January 2022.

For more than a decade, Katz has been exploring painting's relationship to questions of identity and expression, selfhood and voice. Animated by a restless sense of humour and curiosity, her works articulate a tricksy language of recurring forms – roosters, monkeys and cabbages, among other things – that are by turns familiar and enigmatic. Katz's paintings, as well as her ceramics and posters, are frequently bodily (full of noses and gaping mouths) and relentlessly wordy, thick with puns and allusions. What emerges from these multilayered works is a sustained and critical pursuit of what the artist has called “genuine ambiguity”.

For Katz, “Artery” is a resonant and loaded title. Arteries are the blood vessels that carry oxygen-rich blood, flowing from the heart to the rest of the body. Katz has said, “I want to emphasise the non-order of things, from inside to out.” Arteries are inside us (and “art” is nestled inside “artery”), but they also connect us: the “arterial” is used to describe major highways, subterranean cabling, branching rail networks and winding river systems. This exhibition is preoccupied by these networks and channels, by the spaces between inside and outside, you and me, experience and image.

Across both venues, Artery responds to the particularities of the gallery spaces and locations. At Nottingham Contemporary, the works will be installed along and behind a series of angled walls, apertures and peepholes; at Camden Art Centre, the exhibition will be reimagined, and be joined by new paintings and works in ceramic. All of the works in Artery were made during the last 18 months, in the midst of an ongoing series of national lockdowns. The questions they ask – of communication and connection, of intimacy without touching – are as much a response to this current moment as a continued exploration of themes that have persisted throughout painting's history.

Artery will be accompanied by a publication, designed by Studio Mathias Clottu.

Mélanie Matranga: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4

Mélanie Matranga's films, installations and sculptures are at once intimate and elegiac. Her work asks fraught and timely questions about images and memory, privacy and proximity. Titled 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, this is the French artist's first institutional solo show in the UK, and all of the works here were made over the last year. At a time when we have become accustomed to confinement and isolation, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 offers a sensitive reflection on how we see ourselves as individuals, and on the social fabric that binds us together.

Matranga has, for a number of years, been preoccupied with the gap between intimacy and feeling alone, together. Fundamental to this exhibition is the way in which the private can become public. Divided into a series of rooms, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 begins with a purpose-built kitchen – a domestic space dressed with flowers and fruit that are left to decay over the course of the exhibition. This leads on to Matranga’s most ambitious moving-image work to date, People (2021), a 25-minute black and white film. Shot in the artist’s own apartment, a space which recurs throughout the exhibition as well as in her previous works, People follows individuals from the artist’s own life, playing ‘themselves’ in front of the camera. Contrasting moments of isolation and togetherness draw out feelings of dependency, angst and pain, both real and imagined. As with all of Matranga’s films, she resists a singular reading of intimacy, instead preferring to play with the poetics of pleasure and plurality.

Thoughts, gestures and words are often at odds with one another, as gaps emerge between what’s seen and what’s said. The intensity and limitations of language are implied, bodies communicating when words do not suffice. The camera wanders, looping through and around the film’s different rooms and characters. Tight voyeuristic shots blur body and language, picking at the binaries of subject/object and matter/mind.

Beyond the film, sculptural works – assemblages, domestic panoramas and a maquette of where the artist lives and works – present worlds within worlds. The spaces are haunted by personal objects including clothes and bedding, while hand stitched words and numbers echo throughout. Roughly plastered walls and visible cabling suggest that this is a space in construction, unpolished and unresolved.

The exhibition is generously supported by Fluxus, High Art, Paris / Arles and Karma International. People (2021) is co-produced by furiosa, Misia Films and Nottingham Contemporary.

Erika Verzutti