Featuring more than 20 works of contemporary art from the Museum’s growing permanent collection, Painter’s Painters: Gifts from Alex Katz includes paintings by 13 emerging and mid-career artists working in New York in addition to a selection of works by Katz himself. These include four paintings and a group of chalk and charcoal cartoons that Katz originally produced as 1:1 scaled drawings, later transferred to canvas as compositions for large paintings. All works in the exhibition were given to the High Museum of Art over the course of the past three years by Katz and the Alex Katz Foundation.
Alex Katz (born Brooklyn, N.Y., 1927) is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions since 1951. Considered one of the most influential artists of any generation, Katz is well-known for his large-scale portraits and landscapes, both of which are represented in the exhibition.
Painter’s Painters presents Katz’s work alongside that of a multi-generational and internationally recognized group of contemporary artists including Ronald Bladen, Jan De Vliegher, Christopher Deeton, Martha Diamond, Juan Eduardo Gomez, Josephine Halvorson, Nabil Nahas, Laura Owens, Joyce Pensato, Rob Pruitt, Wilhelm Sasnal, Spencer Sweeney and Charline von Heyl. All but three of these works are on view for the first time at the High in this exhibition.