Alex Katz American, b. 1927
Coca-Cola Girl, 2019
Cutout from shaped powder-coated aluminum, printed the same on each side with UV cured archival inks, clear coated and mounted to a 3/8 inch polished aluminum base
21 x 19 x 3 in.
53.3 x 48.3 x 7.6 cm.
53.3 x 48.3 x 7.6 cm.
Edition of 60
Series: Coca-Cola Girls
Signature etched on base plate, numbered on bottom
Further images
“There were Coca Cola porcelain signs in the 1930s and 1940s, with ladies in bathing suits. And the idea was “everything’s alright”. Like that American optimism. The ads inspired this...
“There were Coca Cola porcelain signs in the 1930s and 1940s, with ladies in bathing suits. And the idea was “everything’s alright”. Like that American optimism. The ads inspired this series” -Alex Katz
In Alex Katz’s Coca-Cola Girl (cutout), a woman wearing a white swimsuit confidently strolls forward. Her blonde hair is blown back by the wind and her arms sway. Although visually a body in motion, mimicking the confident stride of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Katz’s Coca-Cola Girl is nonetheless static and compressed into a flat plane. Nameless and without identifying features, this Coca-Cola Girl is one of the many anonymous women that populated 1950s American advertising. There is a tension between the traditional intimacy of the portraiture genre and the impersonality of this unknown figure – she is both instantly recognizable and eternally unknowable. This work is part of Katz’s wider series entitled Coca-Cola Girl, in which he obsessively depicts different iterations of the iconic Coca-Cola advertisement models. Unlike the rest of the works in the series, this Coca-Cola Girl is not constrained to a flat piece of paper – she is printed on aluminium and stands upright, physically asserting her presence in our space. Katz is known for using economy of line to forcefully distil his subjects into simplistic and compressed forms. In 1959, frustrated with the limitations of a painting, he began to cut out the figures from his canvases. From this initial experiment he developed his pioneering ‘cutouts’; a new technique that allowed him to make even more concentrated investigations into flat surfaces and the problems of visual perception. The ‘cutouts’, such as Coca-Cola Girl, occupy our space like sculptures but are frustratingly two dimensional. Speaking about his ‘cutouts’ in 1968, Katz said “people ask me why I don’t do them in 3-D. Well, I’m an illusionist, and the minute you put them in 3-D, you ruin the illusion”. This illusion forces us to consider both the mechanics of viewing and the act of spectatorship. Contact the gallery or visit our website for learn more about Alex Katz.
In Alex Katz’s Coca-Cola Girl (cutout), a woman wearing a white swimsuit confidently strolls forward. Her blonde hair is blown back by the wind and her arms sway. Although visually a body in motion, mimicking the confident stride of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Katz’s Coca-Cola Girl is nonetheless static and compressed into a flat plane. Nameless and without identifying features, this Coca-Cola Girl is one of the many anonymous women that populated 1950s American advertising. There is a tension between the traditional intimacy of the portraiture genre and the impersonality of this unknown figure – she is both instantly recognizable and eternally unknowable. This work is part of Katz’s wider series entitled Coca-Cola Girl, in which he obsessively depicts different iterations of the iconic Coca-Cola advertisement models. Unlike the rest of the works in the series, this Coca-Cola Girl is not constrained to a flat piece of paper – she is printed on aluminium and stands upright, physically asserting her presence in our space. Katz is known for using economy of line to forcefully distil his subjects into simplistic and compressed forms. In 1959, frustrated with the limitations of a painting, he began to cut out the figures from his canvases. From this initial experiment he developed his pioneering ‘cutouts’; a new technique that allowed him to make even more concentrated investigations into flat surfaces and the problems of visual perception. The ‘cutouts’, such as Coca-Cola Girl, occupy our space like sculptures but are frustratingly two dimensional. Speaking about his ‘cutouts’ in 1968, Katz said “people ask me why I don’t do them in 3-D. Well, I’m an illusionist, and the minute you put them in 3-D, you ruin the illusion”. This illusion forces us to consider both the mechanics of viewing and the act of spectatorship. Contact the gallery or visit our website for learn more about Alex Katz.