ART CITIES: Venice-Alex Katz

Although Alex Katz belongs to the Pop generation of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it was not until the 1970s that his paintings were exhibited internationally. Since the 1980s, Katz has been a protagonist of Cool Painting, and one of the most influential painters of our present day.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fondazione Giorgio Cini Archive

Alex Katz’s solo exhibition “Claire, Grass and Water” is conceived as a site-specific intervention and spans three major groupings of never-before-seen works made between 2021 and 2022 that represent three key facets of Katz’s practice, the boundaries of which continue to expand seven decades into his career. Large-scale, close-up depictions of inky-hued oceans and of grassland in tones of greens and yellows are brought together followed by a group of paintings based on outfits by mid-century American fashion designer Claire McCardell. Coming of age as an artist in 1950s New York, Katz developed his unique approach to contemporary representational painting at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, he focused much of his attention on largescale landscape paintings that he characterizes as ‘environmental’, the evolution of which can be seen in the new closely cropped, all-encompassing landscapes and waterscapes on view in the exhibition. As the artist says of these new paintings: “The closeup gives the painting much more power and energy. With the close-ups, I could make a realistic painting that could compete with a de Kooning or a Pollock”. It was not until the 2010s that Katz began painting multiple tightly cropped portraits sequenced across the canvas as if in a strip of film, combining a variety of angles to create the impression of an ‘environmental’ portrait. For this exhibition, he has renewed this cinematic compositional logic by applying it to Claire McCardell’s celebrated designs. Water has been a recurring element in Katz’s paintings since his early formative years, though it first became a subject in its own right in his 1986 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Starting in the 1980s with his ongoing “Black Brook” series, works from which are held by Tate, London, and the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, Katz continued exploring the effects of light and reflection on the surface of water over the course of the decades that followed with works such as “Dark Reflections” or “Grey Marine”. This aspect of Katz’s practice is highlighted in this exhibition in the “City of Water” with a new group of oceanscapes, rendered in monochrome with expressive white brushstrokes landing on dark grounds to suggest waves breaking or moonlight catching on the surface of a fathomless sea. It is these fleeting patterns of glinting light on dark, rather than color, that are most important to Katz. Katz has always defined himself as a painter of ‘the immediate present’, in his landscapes as much as in his portraits. It was with landscapes that Katz found his voice as a young painter, exploring the lakes and forests of Maine while a student at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. There, he discovered the freedom that comes with working en plein air, like the Impressionists, painting quick oil sketches in nature which he then turned into large-scale environmental works in his studio. Cropped and painted larger than life, the paintings of grass on view in the exhibition lend the windswept blades a quiet but powerful beauty. Exemplifying the distinctive relationship between abstraction and figuration that characterizes Katz’s work, they focus on a small, unmoored slice of life, allowing poetry and abstract thinking to arise from pure perception rather than narrative. Katz has long been interested in fashion design, particularly as it relates to the American vernacular tradition: as early as 1960, he paid homage to the iconic ‘little black dress’ that marked 20th-century fashion in his renowned “The Black Dress”. In the 1980s, his admiration for the work of American designer Norma Kamali, who was herself influenced by McCardell, resulted in the well-known paintings “Pas De Deux” and “Eleuthera”. Several of the works in the exhibition feature bipartite or even tripartite compositions which blend different perspectives and fragments of McCardell’s outfits into impossible and yet captivating images that recall the visual strategies of Cubism and, in particular, Picasso’s 1937 “Portrait of Dora Maar” which Katz wrote of his admiration for in his 2012 autobiography Invented Symbols. In one work, two models in different dresses, slightly offset, are spliced together at the center of the canvas to form a single surprising silhouette, while in another, a female figure seems to lean out from within an outfit sliced down its middle. The crops and close-ups in these works borrow from the dynamics of cinema montage to emulate dramatic camera framings.

Photo: Alex Katz, Claire, Grass and Water, Exhibition View, Fondazione Giorgio Cini-Venice, 2024, courtesy the artist, Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Curator: Luca Massimo Barbero, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 30133 Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy, Duration: 17/4-29/9/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 10;00-18:00, www.visitcini.com/