Alex Katz Catalog

ALEX KATZ 13 DECEMBER THRU 31 JANUARY 2014

New Release | Yellow Tulips prints 1990 – 2013

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

Yellow Tulips, 2013

16-Color Silkscreen Print on 4-Ply Museum Board 48 x 77 inches Edition 6/50

Flags, 2013

1-color woodcut on Lanaquarelle 640 gsm paper 42 x 120 inches Edition 35

Late Summer Flowers, 2013

38-color silkscreen on 4-ply museum board 40 x 55 inches Edition 14/50

Reflection, 2010

7-color silkscreen on RL Saunders Waterford 410 GSM paper 58 x 58 inches Edition 39/50

Sophie, 2013

Oil paint on Masonite panel 12 x 16 inches

Portraits (Sara, Sophie, Vivien), 2012

32-41 color silkscreen on 2-ply museum board 39 x 41 inches Edition 60 No. HC 4/4

Ada, 2011

31-color Japanese woodblock on New Hosho paper 22 x 30 inches Edition 70 No. PP 2/3

Alex Katz, Self-Portrait (Passing), 1990 23-color silkscreen on Arches Rag Paper 32 1/2 x 36 inches Edition 79/150

Alex Katz in Studio Drawing Woodblock for Flags, 2013

Alex Katz in Studio Completed Woodblock for Flags, 2013

Alex Katz in Studio for Architectural Digest Late Summer Flowers Canvas pictured

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. Katz’s first one-person show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954. In the late 1950s, he moved towards greater realism in his paintings. Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture, and painted his friends and his wife and muse, Ada. He embraced monochrome backgrounds, which would become a defining characteristic of his style, anticipating Pop Art and separating him from gestural figure painters and the New Perceptual Realism. In 1959, Katz made his first cutout, which would grow into a series of flat “sculptures;” freestanding or relief portraits that exist in actual space.

In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting largescale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings, which he characterizes as “environmental.” Rather than observing a scene from afar, the viewer feels enveloped by nearby nature. Katz began each of these canvases with “an idea of the landscape, a conception,” trying to find the image in nature afterwards. In his landscape paintings, Katz loosened the edges of the forms, executing the works with greater painterliness than before in these allover canvases. At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also began painting flowers in profusion, covering canvases in blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s, when he painted large close-ups of flowers in solitude or in small clusters.

Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951. In 2010, Alex Katz Prints was on view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which showed a retrospective survey of over 150 graphic works. The National Portrait Gallery in London presented an exhibition titled Alex Katz Portraits. In 2009-2010, Alex Katz: An American Way Of Seeing was on view at the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland; Musée Grenoble, Grenoble, France; and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany.

Katz has received numerous accolades throughout his career. Works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Most notably, those in America include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Des Moines Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In 1968, Katz moved to an artists’ cooperative building in SoHo, where he has lived and worked ever since. He continues to spend his summers in Lincolnville, Maine.

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