Alex Katz has garnered international acclaim for his impressive body of paintings and prints rendered in a unique, striking style.
From portraits of his wife, Ada, to sweeping landscapes or studies of nature, Katz has excelled in his ability to simplify form while enlivening it with rich color. On the one hand he embraces the real, while on the other hand he flattens his figures and forms to the point that they begin to eliminate all allusions to perspective. The result is a body of work that truly investigates the act of building form in each composition in a strikingly compelling manner.
Born in Brooklyn in the years leading up to the Great Depression, Katz studied at both New York’s Cooper Union School of Art as well as the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Responding to the expressive qualities of mid-century painting, Katz developed a reductive yet rich compositional style that carried him into the later years of the twentieth century. He won the St. Gaudens Medal in Art in 1980 and was a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2001. His works have been included in a wide array of exhibitions around the globe, including the Whitney Museum, New York, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain.