The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has opened 'Allison Katz: Jeu d'esprit', the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Quebec. On view from 9 October 2026 to 14 March 2027, the show brings together major recent works and entirely new paintings in an exhibition design conceived by the artist herself. Katz, one of the most distinctive painters of her generation, builds her pictures through layered references that move between fiction, dreams and art history. The exhibition takes its title and much of its imaginative material from Gradiva, the figure from Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novel who inspired Sigmund Freud and, later, the Surrealists as an emblem of how creativity can repress, sublimate and ultimately release buried truths. For Katz, painting performs a reversal of that archaeological process: the surface reveals as much as it layers and disguises. Her incorporation of materials such as sand and rice gives the paintings a tactile dimension that heightens both their physical and metaphorical layering. Inspired by Gradiva's ability to cross thresholds of time and space, Katz invites visitors to follow new pathways through the galleries — one Gradiva work will even cross the threshold of the exhibition space and be installed elsewhere in the museum for visitors to seek out. Organised by the museum and curated by its Zhao-Ionescu Chief Curator, Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the exhibition is a homecoming of sorts for an artist whose work has been championed in recent years by Hauser & Wirth. It positions the MMFA as a key stop for international contemporary painting this season.