Born in Chicago, Illinois (b. 1967)

Ruth Root

Untitled 10, 2019

Fabric, PVC panel, enamel paint, and spray paint
© Ruth Root; courtesy the artist. 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.

Ruth Root. Photo by Nina Choi.

“There needs to be a way of making sense of being a painter and acknowledging all that has come before you, and trying to make something that adds to that dialogue but is also something you experience visually, not through language.”

—Ruth Root

Ruth Root

“There needs to be a way of making sense of being a painter and acknowledging all that has come before you, and trying to make something that adds to that dialogue but is also something you experience visually, not through language.”—Ruth Root

“There needs to be a way of making sense of being a painter and acknowledging all that has come before you, and trying to make something that adds to that dialogue but is also something you experience visually, not through language.”

—Ruth Root