ART CITIES: N.York-Alex Katz

Alex Katz is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive

Alex Katz’s earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.” Alex Katz presents “Seasons”, a selection of works from the artist’s new series of landscape paintings. The presentation feature fours monumental paintings, one for each season, ranging in size from ten to twenty feet long, that belong to an extensive series of new works created in Katz’s New York studio between 2022 and 2024 that capture landscapes in New York and in Lincolnville, Maine, where Katz spends his summers. As the curator of the exhibition says “Some of our projects at MoMA take nearly a decade to prepare, while others are virtually spur of the moment, as part of our mission to be a platform for brand-new work. These new paintings by Alex Katz, part of a set of more than 100 compositions with trees made over the past two years, show an artist at the top of his game, doing what he’s been doing for decades and somehow still making it entirely new and surprising”. The exhibition marks the museum debut of Katz’s latest series of landscapes. To create these works, Katz often begins with photographs, shot on his iPhone, and smaller painted sketches, which he subsequently transforms into large-scale compositions. Katz paints quickly, frequently completing an entire painting within a single morning. Katz removes the traditional indication of a horizon—a decision that, when paired with the large scale of the paintings, envelopes the viewer in an environment with no clear beginning or end. Katz said of the series, “The sensation of color is what I wanted. The sensation of seeing”.

Photo: Alex Katz. Spring, 2023. Oil on linen. Overall: 120 x 252 inches (304.8 x 640.1 cm). © Alex Katz / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photography by David Regen

Info: Curators: Ann Temkin, Elizabeth Wickham and Lydia Mullin, MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art), 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/7-8/9/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:30-17:30, Sat 10:30-19:00, www.moma.org/