Alex Katz He is one of the most recognized and exhibited artists of his generation. He often associated with the movement Pop art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and has since produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Katz lives and works in NY. I study in the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
His early works were inspired by various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes have a flattened surface and a consistent economy of line.
Source: MMOCA
Using characteristically broad brush strokes, large swathes of color and refined compositions, Katz created what the art historian Robert Storr he called "a distinctive new type of realism in American art that combines aspects of both abstraction and representation."
Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s in NY, Katz developed his unique approach to contemporary figurative painting at the height of Abstract Expressionism.
In this way, Katz became an artist interested in using color and form to represent the human figure during daily and fleeting moments. He cuts off his views and brings the viewer closer to express the immediacy of the present.
In the seven decades since his first exhibition in 1954, he has produced a celebrated body of work, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and engravings.
A preeminent painter of modern life, draws inspiration from movies, billboards, music, poetry, and his close circle of friends and family.
Working primarily from life, he produces images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed strokes and flat color planes. Her great admiration for his sense of color, composition, and economy of means of Henri Matisse it is evident in Katz's work, as well as his interest in the American vernacular tradition.
Since then, Alex's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo shows and nearly 500 group shows around the world. Her work can be found in nearly 100 public collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Art Museum, NY; Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; among many others.
Alex Katz will be the subject of an upcoming retrospective of his career at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the city of NY, which will open in 2023.
