Born in Brixlegg, Austria (b. 1971)

Ulrike Müller

Sequitur, 2020

Vitreous enamel on steel
© Ulrike Müller. 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.

Ulrike Müller. Courtesy of Art in America.

“Picking colors from a preformulated palette introduces a culturally shared element—a language with built- in ideas and assumptions, like the six or eight colors that kids are given in a box of crayons. They’re supposed to be enough to depict the world.”

—Ulrike Müller

Ulrike Müller

“Picking colors from a preformulated palette introduces a culturally shared element—a language with built-­ in ideas and assumptions, like the six or eight colors that kids are given in a box of crayons. They’re supposed to be enough to depict the world.”—Ulrike Müller

“Picking colors from a preformulated palette introduces a culturally shared element—a language with built- in ideas and assumptions, like the six or eight colors that kids are given in a box of crayons. They’re supposed to be enough to depict the world.”

—Ulrike Müller