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
Vivien in White Coat, 2021Porcelain enamel on shaped steel with aluminum core and polished edges and mounted on polished stainless base71 1/2 x 33 x 14 1/2 in.
181.6 x 83.8 x 36.8 cm.Edition of 6Signature etched in baseAlex Katz’s Vivien with White Coat belongs to a sustained series of portraits depicting Vivien Bittencourt, the artist’s daughter-in-law, whose image has served as a recurring subject within his recent...Alex Katz’s Vivien with White Coat belongs to a sustained series of portraits depicting Vivien Bittencourt, the artist’s daughter-in-law, whose image has served as a recurring subject within his recent practice. Through a restrained palette and a sharply defined silhouette, Katz presents the figure as both an individual presence and a carefully composed visual form. The white coat becomes the central element of the composition, its luminous surface and architectural structure shaping the relationship between figure, gesture, and space. Katz’s characteristic economy of line and color heightens the tension between specificity and abstraction, transforming an everyday article of clothing into an emblematic visual motif. The cropped perspective and enlarged scale draw attention to the rhythms of contour, pattern, and surface that have long defined his approach to portraiture.Since the 1950s, Katz has occupied a distinctive position within American art, developing a mode of representation that combines the immediacy of contemporary imagery with the formal discipline of modernist painting. Vivien with White Coat continues his exploration of appearance, presence, and perception, revealing the enduring complexity within his pared-down visual language.
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