Alex Katz

Alex Katz is one of the most important artists to emerge on the American art scene since 1950. In this exhibition of twelve new paintings Katz shows the vitality that has made him a pivotal figure for so many younger artists.
 
The elongated composition of five new portraits challenge the conventions of portraiture. Each woman is cropped almost to the point of abstraction, referring to the cropping technique in Katz’s celebrated painting ‘Red Coat’ from 1982. The images are direct and sharp, with intense flat colour planes that transform each woman to near iconic status.
 
The new landscape paintings contrast with these portraits in both format and colour, but again show Katz pushing the boundaries of what he can achieve. A solid blank canvas with a few irregular white marks becomes moonlight passing through branches. In another, tree branches and trunks set up a rhythmic passage across a 5 metre wide canvas.
 
Katz’s love of mass media, photography and cartoons makes him central to the artistic concerns of a younger generation of artists.  However, when Alex Katz came to recognition in the 1950s, his work was at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism. Katz had trained as a graphic designer, designing posters, book jackets and magazine covers, and this sensibility still informs his close-up vantage points and cropped compositions.
 
Alex Katz was born in New York in 1927. His first solo show was in New York in 1954. Major exhibitions since have included retrospectives by the Whitney Museum of American Art (1986); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Germany (1995); IVAM, Spain (1996); P.S.1, New York (1996-8); Saatchi Gallery, London (1998); Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy (1999); Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2000); ‘Small Paintings’ at the Whitney, New York (2002); Kunsthalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2002); the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2003).