Alex Katz

Since 2017, the gallery has been working in close collaboration with the Alex Katz Studio on the printed work of the New York artist. With our first major exhibition, Black & White, in which we showed the monumental Shopping Crowd series, originally created for the shop windows of Barney’s in New York, in Europe for the first time, we gave Katz’s prints a new platform in Europe. The following major exhibition, The Essence of Beauty, built on this.

The gallery supports the artist in sharing his appreciation of the print medium, in which, for him, the reduction to areas of colour culminates, with more and more people.

Alex Katz is one of the formative painters of contemporary American art. His works are held in numerous collections, including MoMA in New York, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and Tate Britain in London. To mark his 95th birthday, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2022 and the Albertina in Vienna in 2023 dedicated major retrospectives to him.

Through consistent abstraction combined with a precise grasp of the mood and gestures of his subjects, he found a visual language of his own within representational painting early on. Not least, his clear and direct documentation of the spirit of the times makes him a forerunner of Pop Art.

Perspective and spatial depth play scarcely any role in Alex Katz’s painting; rather, his works gain their expressiveness through the treatment of the surface. Through its distinctive, linear brushwork, flat areas of colour and reduction to the essential features of the subject, his painting achieves great vitality. Katz’s oeuvre consists predominantly of landscapes from his surroundings and portraits, for which he often paints people from his closest circle. Through cropping and repetition, his subjects at times seem borrowed from advertising or the cinema.

These characteristics of his visual language are particularly evident in the artist’s prints. The idea for a screen print, lithograph, woodcut or aquatint often arises from an existing painting. By further reducing the image to a single perspective and concentrating light, form and colour on the essential character of the subject, 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.

Born in New York in 1927, the artist, who has received numerous awards, studied painting at the Cooper Union Art School in New York and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Firmly rooted in his home country, Alex Katz continues to live and work on the American East Coast.