Exhibition - Alex Katz
COOL PAINTING
ALBERTINA Museum
Exhibition: February – 29 May, 2023
Opening: February 2023
Alex Katz, Installation view: Cool Painting, 2023.
Courtesy to Albertina Museum and the artist. Photo: Robert Bodnar
In honor of Alex Katz's 95th birthday, ALBERTINA offers a comprehensive tribute to the artist from its extensive collection. Alex Katz is one of the most important representatives of American contemporary art. Large formats, broad brush strokes, and vibrant colors are familiar attributes to Katz’ work. His concern is color and composition.
He developed his infamous style of painting while also experimenting with collage, printmaking, and painted aluminum cutouts. His work has served as a beacon of style to younger generations of artists, including Elizabeth Peyton and Julian Opie. A preeminent painter of modern life, he draws inspiration from film, billboards, music, poetry, and close friends and family. His main theme is life, and he creates images that express lines and shapes with carefully composed strokes and solid color planes. His great admiration for Henri Matisse's color, composition, and economy of means is evident in Katz's work, as is his fascination with the colloquial American language.
His first practice was to use cutout figures, mostly consisting of figures painted on canvas glued to plywood. He has maintained the aesthetic of these early works throughout his career. Katz's most famous works are large-scale canvases with simplistic figures set against monochrome backgrounds that minimize any sense of context. Katz's work can be seen as both a reaction and a visual reproduction of the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. The subjects of his paintings are left seeming emotionless, and their severe, even graphic representation rejects any attempt at sentimental engagement. Today, Katz’s work is recognized worldwide, but his popularity is most apparent within the United States, and is held in many of the country’s largest and well known collections.
About:
Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is a contemporary American artist renowned for his large-format paintings of landscapes, flowers, and portraits of his wife Ada. He attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Katz had his first solo exhibition at Roko Gallery in New York City in 1954, and in 1986 the Whitney Museum of American Art held his first retrospective. Katz maintains residences in Lincolnville, ME, and New York, NY. Today, his works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, ME, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., among others.
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