“Black & White”

Opening: 18 January 2018 Exhibition dates: 19 January to 15 February 2018 Opening hours: Tue–Fri: 2 pm–7 pm, Sat, Sun: 12 noon–5 pm Free admission

You can find all the works on our artist page “Alex Katz”

Special edition: To coincide with the exhibition, a special edition will be released, which will be unveiled for the first time on the opening day.

Alex Katz is regarded as one of the formative contemporary painters. The American artist is an exponent of figurative realism, a movement that originated during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in New York and is regarded as one of the precursors of Pop Art. Katz became known to a wider public through his collaboration with the luxury department store Barney’s and his collection for the fashion giant H&M. 2017 was a special year for the artist, born in 1927, as his 90th birthday was marked by numerous exhibitions worldwide. From 19 January to 20 February 2018, Hamburg’s Barlach Halle K will show ‘Black & White’, a comprehensive presentation of Alex Katz’s prints, curated and organised by Galerie Schimming. ‘Black & White’ focuses on the artist’s black-and-white works. To contrast with the monochrome pieces, the curating Galerie Schimming has included individual coloured motifs. A large proportion of the approximately 50 works are on display in Europe for the first time; well-known motifs are juxtaposed with new editions, which until now had only been on view in Washington and Florida. One example is the ‘Shopping Crowd’ series, presented as a print on canvas in a monumental size of three by four metres. The exhibition showcases Katz’s signature motifs, such as his portraits, as well as landscapes and floral still lifes. Beauty is one of Alex Katz’s central themes; the subjects of his works are often women such as the model Christy Turlington or his wife Ada, to whom he has been married for 59 years. In his prints, Katz does not simply reproduce existing paintings, but reflects on his subjects; rendered in black and white, they develop an aesthetic of reduction of their own through the deliberate use of light and shadow, whilst he employs a wide variety of techniques. The concept for a screen print, lithograph, woodcut or aquatint is developed on the basis of a specific painting. With the help of the extensive possibilities offered by printmaking, the core message of the original work is refined and condensed. The synthesising effect, which the artist continues to develop in close collaboration with well-known printers, enhances the two-dimensional and artificial qualities in the reproduction of his motifs. Through the heightened reduction to a single perspective, as well as the concentration of light, form and colour on the core character of the motif, Alex Katz takes the original pictorial idea further in his prints. This formal, technical and conceptual precision gives his printed work a weight of its own within the long tradition of the medium. The significance of this body of work is evident not least in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna, which holds almost the entirety of Katz’s printmaking oeuvre. The exhibition ‘Alex Katz in Colour’ is running in parallel at Galerie Schimming in Hamburg-Harvestehude.