Alex Katz American, b. 1927
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Alex Katz is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. Born in Brooklyn, New York on July 24, 1927, he studied in New York and in Skowhegan, Maine between 1946 and 1950. In the early 1950s he was influenced by the work of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, and he produced swiftly executed pictures of trees and various works based on photographs. In the mid 1950s, working from life, Katz painted spare, brightly coloured landscapes, interiors, and figures. Soon afterward he also produced simplified images in collage. These early works emphasized the flatness of the picture plane while remaining representational, and this insistence on figuration placed him outside the contemporary avant-garde mainstream, in which abstraction and chance were key qualities. Katz developed his style in the portrait works of ordinary people from the late 1950s, such as Ada with White Dress (1958). This resolution of the demands of formalism and representation looked forward to the Pop Art of the following decade.
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"[Katz] has always had his own direction, which has not been the direction of mainstream art in any of the last seven decades. In a Katz painting, style-the way it's painted-is the primary element. His confident, crisply articulated technique makes us see the world the way he sees it, clear and up close, with all but the most essential details pared away." - Calvin Tomkins
Katz's works are held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Detroit Institute of Art, The Tate Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, Museo Rufino Tamayo, The Guggenheim Bilbao, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute, among others. -
Works
Alex Katz American, b. 1927
Springtime, 2026Silkscreen in colours on Saunders Waterford High White HP 425 gsm fine art paper42 x 72 in.
106.7 x 182.9 cm.Edition of 50Signed and dated along lower marginFurther images
Based on a painting from 2009, Springtime brings together many of the formal concerns that have defined Alex Katz's work since the late 1950s. Six women, dressed in white and...Based on a painting from 2009, Springtime brings together many of the formal concerns that have defined Alex Katz's work since the late 1950s. Six women, dressed in white and set against a field of bright green, move across the composition in a slow, measured sequence. What first appears to be a group portrait is built from repeated views of only two models, introducing a sense of rhythm that owes as much to cinema and fashion photography as it does to portraiture.
Katz developed his approach at a moment when American painting was moving away from the gestural intensity of Abstract Expressionism. His response was to strip away illusionistic depth and emphasize the surface of the picture. Broad areas of unmodulated color, crisp edges, and compressed space keep the viewer's attention fixed on the picture plane. While his work is often discussed alongside Pop Art because of its clarity and its engagement with contemporary life, Katz remained committed to painting as a formal language rather than a vehicle for irony or mass cultural critique.
Throughout Springtime, repetition becomes a compositional device rather than a narrative one. The repeated figures establish a steady visual rhythm across the print, while subtle shifts in posture and direction animate the otherwise restrained composition. Light is treated as a condition of seeing instead of a means of modeling form, allowing color, contour, and scale to define the image. Katz's ability to reduce a scene to its essential elements gives Springtime a sense of immediacy that has remained central to his work for more than six decades.
Publications
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