ART CITIES: Chicago- Alex Katz

Alex Katz, Soldiers, 1981, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray GalleryAlex Katz has always distanced himself from Art Movements, he has refuted the principles of Abstraction, whilst still being inspired by Pollock’s Action Paintings. Alex Katz does not consider his drawings preparatory sketches for paintings. Rather, when the artist starts to realize a drawing, long before oil touches canvas, he already has a very precise idea of the picture in his mind’s eye.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Richard Gray Gallery

The exhibition “Alex Katz: Present Tense”, at Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago that opens today and the respective exhibition opens at Richard Gray Gallery in New York asserts the vital importance of drawing to the artist’s practice. Bringing together portraits from a span of 60 years, the exhibition reveals drawing as a place where the artist’s vision is explored, structured and recorded. A central facet of Katz’s work, drawing serves as a tool of immediacy that enables him to capture the present moment in line, tone and surface. The experience of the drawings, for both the maker and the viewer, is one of intimacy. The paper captures the artist’s hand in direct and unexpected ways. As Robert Storr notes in his exhibition text, these drawings are full of “Monumentality and forceful graphic anomalies”, traits that show them as icons of Katz’s method and style. Storr not only traces the development of Katz’s drawing practice, but also sets him within a larger view of the European and American Avant-garde in the Modern period, showing Katz’s perceptual affinities with artists like Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and Piet Mondrian. Like these artists, Katz uses drawing as a means of structuring his images, of putting them together line by line as an experience, not a resemblance. This exhibition of Katz’s drawings is a testament to a lifetime of training and discipline, as well as a concession to some deep inner impulses that he seems only partly in control of.

Info: Richard Gray Gallery, 875 North Michigan Avenue, 38th Floor, Chicago, Duration: 25/2-23/4/16, Days & Hours: 10:00-17:30 & Richard Gray Gallery, 1018 Madison Avenue, 4th floor, New York, Duration: 29/2-22/4/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, www.richardgraygallery.com

Alex Katz, Black Hat 2, 2010, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery
Alex Katz, Black Hat 2, 2010, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery

 

 

Alex Katz, Elizabeth, 2011, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery
Alex Katz, Elizabeth, 2011, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery

 

 

Alex Katz, Eric, 2008, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery
Alex Katz, Eric, 2008, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery

 

 

Alex Katz, Jeannie, 1974, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery
Alex Katz, Jeannie, 1974, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery

 

 

Alex Katz, Sante, 2006, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery
Alex Katz, Sante, 2006, Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery