A Starling Orbit (real facts, real fiction), 2021

Nylon-­ based ink on fabric, aluminum, ash frame, steel, maple, fabric, zippers, cross-­ stitch embroidery, cast Jesmonite, painted balsa wood, cast pewter, marbles, cotton, bitumen paper, ballpoint pen, beads, paper bag, chamois leather, milk-­ bottle tops, black sand, and steel rebar
© Helen Marten; courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo by Eva Herzog.

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.