"Katz does not paint, Katz remembers.... Katz's paintings are as precise and as vague as memory itself... and just like memory, this art loves the moment, the detail...", was written in the weekly newspaper "DIE ZEIT" about the New York painter, whose works deal with figure and surface and move between modern realism and pop art.
Biography
Alex Katz – American, born in 1927 – became known for his large-format portraits, which he realized in a striking figurative style. Katz was born in Brooklyn and attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, after which he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA. During the height of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, the artist’s representative works were created; the paintings of the 1950s again show the influence of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through their rapid and expressive brushstrokes. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, his penchant for simplified forms, careful studies of light, flatness and color are clearly evident in his work. With his fidelity to figuration and the inclusion of the two-dimensional surface, he is considered a forerunner of Pop Art.
Katz also worked on collages, prints and scene paintings and in the 1970s increasingly concentrated on working with these media and designing free-standing sculptural collages. In later years he created large landscape paintings designed to draw the observer into the environment, and to this day he continues to paint pictures of naturalistic subjects.
The artist has had solo exhibitions in institutions such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Jewish Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain. Katz has received many honors for his work, such as the Guggenheim Fellowship and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He currently lives in New York and Maine.
