Alex Katz

Biography

Alex Katz, born in 1927 in Brooklyn, the United States of America, is a contemporary painter living and working in New York. Katz is best known for his representational paintings depicting simplified figures on a monochrome background, or landscapes and still lives alternating flats planes of color with energetic brushstrokes.

The illustrious career of the American artist spans over seven decades. Katz made a name for himself in the New York art scene in the 1950s. During the absolute height of Modern Art and Abstract Expressionism, Katz’s paintings went against the grain by developing a characteristic figurative visual language.

Influenced by Abstract Expressionism and the arrival of Pop Art in the 1960s, his oeuvre is characterized by the visual interplay of flat surfaces of colour, figuration, and the power of the brushstroke. Katz draws inspiration from modern life, his direct environment – think of his wife or friends – but also music, film and even advertising.

Due to the arrival and democratization of new visual media such as film and cinema, Katz started to implement photographic and cinematic strategies into his painterly oeuvre. Think of cropping to find the perfect frame of an image, a decoupage of the figure, or a repetition of images to create a rhythm within the painting.

Career Facts

Alex Katz in one of the undoubted most important painters of his generation. The American artist studied at the Cooper Union School Art in New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Katz is represented by industry leading art galleries such as Thaddaeus Ropac.

Katz as exhibited across the globe, encompassing group and solo exhibitions at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the United States of America; the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the United Kingdom; the Baltimore Museum of Art, the United States of America; the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland; the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland; the National Portrait Gallery in London, the United Kingdom; Tate Liverpool, the United Kingdom; Albertina in Vienna, Austria; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the United States of America; Serpentine Galleries in London, the United Kingdom; the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain; and a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the United States of America.

Alex Katz Books

For further reading on Alex Katz, we highly recommend the following monographic publications:

• Alex Katz. Rizzoli Electa, 2020.
• Alex Katz: Quick Light. Koenig Books, 2016.
• Alex Katz: This Is Now. High Museum of Art, 2015.
• Alex Katz. Phaidon, 2006.

Artworks

Last Updated on May 3, 2023