ALEX KATZ
Alex Katz, born in 1927 in New York as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, is one of the most important painters of our time worldwide.
Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art from 1946 to 1949. He then attended the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which would later also produce influential artists such as David Reed and Jason Rhoades, among others.
From the 1950s onward, Katz developed a very independent painterly language that addresses the traditional genre of the landscape, as well as portrait or figure painting.
Although the general public sees Alex Katz as a pop artist, he does not consider himself to be one. Rather than emanating from a graphic implementation, such as that which pervades the works of Robert Indiana or Roy Lichtenstein, his images continuously emanate from painting.
Katz always begins his work by occupying himself with paint, from which he develops his very characteristic large-scale intercourse with space. The design of his pictorial reality is usually laid out extensively and appears with sharp, precise edges in his works from, at the latest, the end of the 1960s onward.
He sees himself as a post-abstract painter who arranges the figure elements and signs elements in his realistic painting style so that the observers combine them “in their heads” themselves. Katz is interested in the elementary question: What is reality?
Taking this question as a starting point, he has spent the past 50 years repeatedly exploring possible ways with which “realism” can be redefined. Color and light play a central role in his works. Thus, despite the ostensible realism, he pays less attention to the motif than the look and style, i.e., the appearance.
Alex Katz is represented in numerous international private and museum collections and can reflect on a wealth of international exhibition activity.