Allison Katz
In The House of The Trembling Eye

“I consider painting to be a conversation. As an artist who was asked to curate, I was guided primarily by this principle of conversation across generation, across location, and medium. Staging a work is part of how I think about painting, and the encounter with a work of art is very important to me.”
—Allison Katz

Artist Allison Katz guides us through the world of In the House of the Trembling Eye, the group exhibition she staged across the Aspen Art Museum from May 30–September 29, 2024. Organized in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and marking the Museum’s 45th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of its Shigeru Ban–designed building, the exhibition brought together more than one hundred artworks and objects from different epochs. Katz approached curation as an extension of painting, presenting her own work alongside that of over fifty artists and ancient Pompeian fresco fragments, many never before shown in the United States. Grafting the spatial logic of a Pompeian domus onto the museum, the exhibition choreographed movement and attention while proposing painting as a call-and-response across time.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new catalogue designed by Studio Mathias Clottu, now available to order from the Museum Shop. Featuring newly commissioned writing by Katz alongside a number of collaborators, including Stella Bottai, Nuar Alsadir, and Ariana Reines, In the House of the Trembling Eye merges archaeological research, paintings, poetry, essays, conversations, and over 300 color images to reflect on art’s capacity to collapse past and present, time and space.