ALEX K A T Z
The Boca Raton Tower Lobby
ALEX K A T Z
The Boca Raton Tower Lobby
22-color silkscreen on Saunders Waterford High White HP 425 gsm fine art paper, 36 x 72 inches
Coca Cola Girls 9
EDITION 21/60, 2019
26-color silkscreen on Saunders Waterford High White HP 425 gsm fine art paper, 36 x 102 inches
Girls 3
EDITION 38/60, 2019
20-color silkscreen on Saunders Waterford High White HP 425 gsm fine art paper, 40 x 50 inches
Alex Katz: Presented by Sponder Gallery at The Boca Raton, Tower Lobby
Few painters in the postwar era have sustained a practice as consistently elegant and incisively distilled as Alex Katz (b 1927) Renowned for his portraits, especially of Ada Katz, his wife and enduring muse, and expansive landscapes rendered with graphic immediacy,
Katz occupies a singular position in the history of American painting Trained at Cooper Union and later at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he absorbed the discipline of plein air painting, Katz forged an aesthetic counterpoint to the dominant abstraction of the New York School Rather than surrender to gestural excess Katz sought to reclaim clarity, surface, and figure constructing a pictorial language of economy and restraint that flirted with the visual logic of cinema, advertising, and fashion without collapsing into mere pastiche
Katz s ongoing commitment to figuration, chromatic boldness, and pictorial flatness aligns him with but also distinguishes him from, the trajectories of Pop Art His work resists easy categorization, marked instead by a visual syntax that is unmistakably his own The smoothness of Katz’s painted surfaces belies the conceptual rigor beneath them: a meditation on time, presence and perception, filtered through the cool gaze of modernity
This observation is critical in apprehending the aesthetic ethos that defines Katz s practice, a formal reductivism that undergirds his visual language Katz’s compositional strategies are grounded in a deliberate paring down of pictorial information, wherein only the most essential elements of his subjects are retained
Faces and figures emerge not through layered chiaroscuro or expressive brushwork, but via decisive, planar application of color that conveys presence with startling immediacy In dialogue with the tenets of modernist abstraction, Katz’s work articulates a quiet resistance to its orthodoxy: a painterly precision that embraces clarity over ambiguity, economy over excess His flattened, illustrative surfaces, punctuated by graphic contours and minimal modeling, eschew the portrait in favor of a distilled visual lexicon
At its core, this subtractive methodology is a conceptual tool: a mechanism through which Katz suppresses visual cacophony in order to accentuate the elemental features that define his aesthetic vision
This exhibition, presented by Sponder Gallery within the iconic Tower Lobby of The Boca Raton, traces Katz’s mastery across both portraiture and landscape Works Coca Cola Girls 4 and 9 exemplify his enduring fascination with the face as surface and symbols , (American Dream)
American Art, the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and most recently his 2022 retrospective at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York His works reside in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art the Brooklyn Museum the Tate, and the Smithsonian Institution among others
In presenting ALEX KATZ at The Boca Raton Tower Lobby, Sponder Gallery offers a rare and nuanced view into the evolution of Katz’s practice illuminating the enduring relevance of his vision It is a testament to a painter who across seven decades, has made the ephemeral not only visible but indelible
-Gabriel Diego Delgado
Chance I, II, III (Anne,Vivien and Darinka)
EDITION 9/50, 2016
Color silkscreen on Saunders Waterford 425 gsm paper, 70 x 46 inch
Alex Katz, Ariel (B&W)
ION 29/40, 2016
screen on Saunders 425gms paper,
23, 2024 - July 2025