Alex Katz, This Is Now explores the development of landscape in Katz’s career, from a seminal subject in his earliest work to its prominence in Katz’s art of the last twenty-five years.
Past Exhibition
Alex Katz, This Is Now
June 21 – September 6, 2015
Summer Picnic, 1975
Alex Katz
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYKatz’s emotionally cool portraits are like mirrors upon which we may project our own feelings. The environment in Summer Picnic provides a spatial and atmospheric context for the figures. From the beginning of Katz’s career, landscape has provided this direct route to context. Summer Picnic acts as a transitional moment between Katz’s figurative work and his paintings featuring the landscape as a primary theme in and of itself.
Blue Umbrella 2, 1972
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Private collection, New York
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYIn Katz’s iconic, large-scale portraits from the 1970s, including Blue Umbrella 2, the landscape provides an even, monochromatic field against which the figure is set. Instead of dissolving into negative space, the space around the figure becomes charged with atmospheric energy. This notion of the landscape as an immersive experience would later become a central concern in Katz’s monumental landscape paintings. In them, the viewer steps into the role of the figure depicted in Katz’s earlier work and becomes enveloped by their vast expanses.
January 3, 1993
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Private collection, London
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYKatz’s wife, Ada, has been one of his most enduring subjects since they met in 1957. Her portrait is set against a cool, wintery image of Central Park. The bright fuchsia of her hat and her vermillion-colored lipstick stand out against the gray tones of the trees and sky. In January 3, Ada’s cropped portrait abruptly interrupts the horizontal flow of the landscape, disrupting the painting’s sense of linear time like a jump cut in film.
10:30 am, 2006
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYKatz is interested in seizing upon the instant moment of perception in painting rather than faithfully rendering images in a documentary way. He describes this moment as an explosive “flash” before an image comes into focus and calls it “the present tense.” The painting 10:30 amtransforms the instant moment of seeing into an enveloping and epic experience of a stand of birch trees animated by dappled sunlight.
Sunset, 1987
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYThe surface of Sunset is largely covered in a deeply saturated black, with a passage of fiery red. The painting exemplifies Katz’s superlative handling of color relationships and present images that resonate with a sense of familiarity. Painted with the confident bravado necessary for such a large painting, Sunset captures the fleeting moment of the sun passing through the branches of tall pines.
Sunset 1, 2008
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYIn Sunset 1 and Sunset 3, Katz strives to capture a precise moment when the fleeting light of sunset passes through a stand of trees during a fifteen-minute interval. Returning to the studio with his plein-air oil sketches, he scaled these immediate impressions up exponentially for monumental canvases. The subtle differences between the paintings – the gradations of color, the downward movement of the glowing band of orange light – underscore the immediacy and mutability of perception.
White Roses 9, 2012
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYKatz uses a physically poetic language – similar to dance – in his work, allowing the viewer to adapt that structure to his or her own frame of mind and emotional bearing. Light and form provide an unexpected syncopation of movement across the surface of his paintings of flowers. Painted rapidly and assuredly, wet into wet, the flowers oscillate between states of awkwardness and grace typically associated with the human body.
Study for Black Brook 10, 1990
Alex Katz
Oil on board
Courtesy of the artist
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYFor more than twenty years during summers in Maine, Katz has returned to paint a modest stream near his studio and home in Lincolnville. This work, as with many in the series, shows the cropped reflection of the neighboring landscape on the brook’s surface, thus inverting the image. Through this spatially ambiguous motif, Katz effectively refers to the phenomenon of perception: that images are inverted as they pass through the cornea but are perceived in the mind right-side up.
My Mother’s Dream (7:45 p.m. Monday, 7:45 p.m. Tuesday, 7:45 p.m. Wednesday, 7:45 p.m. Thursday), 1998
Alex Katz
Oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist
© Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYThis immense painting summarizes Katz’s formal and poetic language. Consisting of four views of the same scene represented at distinct but non-consecutive moments during twilight, the painting suggests a jump backward or forward in time. This four-part composition creates a structural logic – similar to the meter of a poem or the rhythm of a piece of music – while establishing a sequence of spatial expansion and compression across the surface of the canvas.
Overview
Alex Katz emerged in the 1950s as a figurative painter in an age of abstraction, challenging critics who shunned imagery in art, especially the figure. While rejecting Abstract Expressionism’s abandonment of imagery, Katz embraced its energy and formal logic. Although best known for his portraits, Katz has painted landscapes both inside the studio and in the out-of-doors since the beginning of his career.
Katz described his goal as the pursuit of capturing “quick things passing” in his work. Katz’s monumental landscape paintings are executed in what is now considered a signature style characterized by flattened planes of color, shallow pictorial space, and lean, reductive but acutely descriptive lines. In them, Katz seeks to convey the appearance of things as they are both felt and perceived in the “present tense,” the now.
Alex Katz
Alex Katz (born Brooklyn, 1927) is a painter whose work is both securely fixed in the canon of postwar American art and in the vanguard of painting today. In 1949, Katz was awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. There, he began painting outdoors under the great open sky. He later said that this practice gave him “a reason to devote [his] life to painting.”
Over the subsequent decades, Katz frequently revisited motifs from the landscape of his beloved Maine. In the fall, winter, and spring months, he turned his eye to the outdoors of Manhattan, creating monumental paintings of Central Park and Madison Square Park. Katz’s most frequent subject is his wife, Ada, whose distinctive visage appears in several scenes of Central Park in winter.