“Codependence” navigates emotional entanglements, historic echoes, and the load of context. From private historical past to artwork historical past, from Magritte’s lengthy shadow over Brussels to the gallery’s personal structure and identify, each ingredient will turn out to be a metaphor for enmeshment. The exhibition considers unseen forces that bind, revealing how photographs, areas, and relationships mutually form and replicate each other. With humor and stress, the works deliver hidden dynamics to the floor, questioning the place autonomy ends and affect begins.
The identify of the gallery, dépendance, emerged from the founders’ aversion to the old school tone of Callies-Jaax Gallery and a need to reject the parable of creative independence— particularly inside a industrial context. The time period additionally hinted at a community of interconnected areas around the globe, difficult the notion of singularity or autonomy. Constructing on these concepts, the works in Codependence discover the dynamics of relational stress via formal disruptions and symbolic motifs, articulating a continuing negotiation between visibility and concealment, intimacy and distance. Whether or not via the quiet resistance of a turned nude, the structure of a carry, or the cyclical return of the pig and sprout, Katz investigates how which means is formed by repetition, distortion, and emotional complexity. Right here, portray turns into greater than image-making— it turns into a website of psychological inquiry.
The exhibition opens with the pressed faces of a child latching in First Attachment (Left) and First Attachment (Proper). Parental bonds lay the inspiration for future codependent patterns, tender but inescapable. Katz considers these early childhood recollections (whether or not remembered or not) as the primary supply materials.
The primal theme continues in Wild Pig (First Portray), which references a forty five,000-year-old cave portray, which has lately been recognized because the earliest recognized instance of figurative artwork. It nods to the gallery’s handle on Rue du Marché aux Porcs (‘pig market’). The pig, clever and enduring, turns into a totem of each historic persistence and financial entanglement
In Co-Creation, Katz reimagines artwork historic representations of the nude, notably Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus and Manet’s Olympia. Two giant black ovals interrupt the composition, performing as eyes or portals, and the determine, seen from the again, eludes the viewer’s gaze. This act of withholding resists objectification, remodeling the portray right into a website of quiet refusal.
With Deadline, Katz confronts the pressures of creation, depicting the act of portray as an pressing launch. The portray is framed by a collection of disembodied eyes, borrowed from a Picabia portray and adorned with blue eyeshadow—the gaze of one other painter, one other period, reanimated via Katz’s hand. Using initials A Ok factors to the artist’s ‘signature’ as each a mark of identification and a graphic design, collapsing authorship into decoration.
A 1:1 scale depiction of the carry contained in the residential entrance that bisects the gallery area, Elevator IV (dépendance) turns a communal area right into a solitary expertise. Put in nearly again to again with the precise elevator, the work alludes to portray itself—layered, transitional, and contingent on context. The addendum ’Depends upon…’ is a replica of the elevator’s mirror. As a portrait of gallerist and artist, it highlights how their relationship operates via reliance and trade; whereas playfully infringing on the self-reflective motif of the artist’s self-portrait in a mirror.
Spring break disrupts the cock motif Katz has been experimenting with for over a decade, depicting a hen for the primary time. She playfully challenges the codependence on motifs for which an artist turns into recognized, twisting recognisability into new prospects. Contained in the stomach of the fowl, Katz makes use of anamorphosis to distort a determine from her earlier work, an avatar of the artist which was impressed by one of many adolescent boys in Degas’ Younger Spartans Exercising. The title Spring break factors to a number of temporalities directly: the present change in season, a sudden motion ahead, a rupture in type or a return to the supply from the place issues originate.
The Finish of Evaluation pits a parsnip towards the Shard, considered one of Europe’s tallest skyscrapers, juxtaposing nature and artifice; what stays buried with what makes an attempt to the touch the sky. It displays Katz’s curiosity in how we construct worlds, each actually and metaphorically—and performs on the thought of the “roots” of civilization and its discontents.
A brand new collection Brussels sprout (and Philip) combines the common-or-garden vegetable with a silhouetted profile, remodeling a still-life right into a portrait. This pairing challenges conventional notions of portraiture and identification, suggesting that even essentially the most mundane objects can carry profound private significance. The Brussels sprout, native to this metropolis, introduces a layer of site-specificity, reinforcing Katz’s curiosity within the interaction between place, language, and which means—echoing Magritte’s methods of surprising surrealism.
The Nice Under is a portray of the gallery’s basement, evoking unseen constructions—emotional, institutional, architectural. The portray units up an summary orientation that contradicts the horizon by wanting up, and thru or past the body.
Collectively the works in “Codependence” resist decision with symbols that proceed to increase. Throughout works that shift between humor and gravity, Katz invitations us to think about the boundaries of independence and the profound, typically uneasy however essential energy of connection.
at dépendance, Brussels
till Might 31, 2025
