Allison Katz: Artery / Mélanie Matranga: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 / Erika Verzutti

Nottingham Contemporary is pleased to announce three solo exhibitions by Allison Katz, Mélanie Matranga, and Erika Verzutti.

Allison Katz: Artery
Titled Artery, Allison Katz’s exhibition is 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. Katz’s paintings, as well as her ceramics and posters, are frequently bodily 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. Katz has said, “I want to emphasise the non-order of things, from inside to out.” Arteries are inside us, 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.

All of the works in Artery have been made in the last year. The exhibition 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 in the exhibition 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 becomes public. Sculptural works—assemblages, domestic panoramas, and a maquette of where the artist lives and works—present worlds within worlds.

0, 1, 2, 3, 4 also features Matranga’s most ambitious moving-image work to date. Shot in the artist’s own apartment, People (2021) follows individuals from Matranga’s 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.

Erika Verzutti
The first solo presentation in a UK museum, this exhibition by Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti gathers more than 40 sculptures from the past 15 years, alongside new work and a site-specific commission.

This survey draws together key examples of her vocabulary of recurring forms. Often humorous forms are realised in a core set of materials that include bronze, concrete and papier mâché. At times seemingly primordial, the sculptures draw from a range of visual sources, including domestic objects, vegetables, newspaper clippings, internet phenomena, and art history.

In this exhibition, Verzutti’s home country represents important points of departure. In sculptures moulded from jackfruits, which can be considered symbolic of Brazil, she defies the Brazilian modernist tradition, slicing, carving, and sculpting the fruits in a tactile celebration of contrasting surfaces.

Alongside these works are a series of new sculptures made from papier mâché, and a new life-size bronze commission that the artist refers to as Venus, the mother of all sculpture. 

Exhibition credits
Allison Katz: Artery is curated by Sam Thorne. In collaboration with Camden Art Centre. Generously supported by the Allison Katz Exhibition Circle.  

Mélanie Matranga: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 is curated by Olivia Aherne. Generously supported by Fluxus, High Art, Paris / Arles and Karma International. People (2020) is co-produced by furiosa, Misia Films and Nottingham Contemporary. 

Erika Verzutti is curated by Nicole Yip with Kiera Blakey, assisted by Hannah Wallis. Generously supported by Henry Moore Foundation, Embassy of Brazil, Alison Jacques, London, and the Erika Verzutti Exhibition Circle.