Alex Katz b. 1927
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927, Alex Katz was raised in Queens by Russian Jewish immigrant parents who had an interest in poetry and the arts. Katz attended Woodrow Wilson High School and later the Cooper Union in Manhattan, where he was first influenced by various modern art theories. However, Katz's time at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine shifted his focus to painting from life, a mindset that became central to his work. His early years in the art scene of New York City saw him developing friendships with figures like Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter, as well as the poets John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. Gradually, Katz's artistic evolution featured a transition from small collages to portraiture, in which monochrome backgrounds became a defining characteristic of his style. His exploration of painted cut-outs and large-scale paintings in the 1960s marked a departure from gestural figure painting, anticipating elements of Pop art.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Katz portrayed groups of figures, capturing the social milieu of artists, poets, and critics in his circle. Concurrently, he delved into set and costume design for choreographer Paul Taylor. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz shifted his focus to large landscape paintings, aiming to envelop viewers in the environment rather than merely observing it from afar. In the early 2000s, Katz began a new phase in his artistic process, employing drastic cropping and composing multiple portraits in tightly sequenced images. He also embraced technology, using his iPhone to create compositions before translating them into large-scale oil paintings. His prolific output continued into the 2020s, with a focus on flowers and landscapes inspired by his surroundings in Pennsylvania.
Katz's work has been exhibited extensively internationally since 1951, with notable retrospectives at prestigious institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. He has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career, including induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting. Katz's legacy as a major American artist extends beyond the art world, with collaborations in literature, fashion, and public art projects. Traces of Katz's style may also be witnessed in a wide array of still practicing artists and his singular vision has informed the fileds of advertising and graphic design as well. Katz's works are today held in over 100 public collections worldwide, solidifying his status as one of the preeminent forces in contemporary art.
