Born in Grand Island, Nebraska (b. 1947)

Dona Nelson

Crow’s Quarters, 2019

Acrylic, graphite, and remnants of cheesecloth on canvas, with steel stand
© Dona Nelson; courtesy of the artist and the Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, and Michael Benevento Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Since 2011, Katz has been making paintings of roosters that she refers to as “cock paintings,” relishing the discomfort of the term. As she has acknowledged, these works reference the male ego: “The paintings are about masculinity, and about trying to work out the iconography of power, and the attraction to it.” The Other Side depicts a rooster in motion through a series of overlapping silhouettes, speed- ing from left to right in a way that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic studies of moving forms. In each of the “cock paintings,” Katz sprinkles grains of rice onto the canvas and paints over them, creating an impasto texture that reinforces the works’ materiality in the face of painterly illusion. The title and imagery of The Other Side draw on the timeless antihumor of the road-crossing chicken.

Dona Nelson. Courtesy of Locks Gallery.

“I am very interested in that place of incoherence in which the image is nearly obliterated by the physical reality of paint... It’s a referencing of very brief moments of disconnect – those once-in-a-whiles when you hear a word as just sound or an image starts to migrate to a pure material reading.”

—Dona Nelson