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Alex Katz
Sunset Cove
1957/2008

Name: Sunset Cove
Brand: Alex Katz

Price:$6,000

About the Item

Alex Katz (b. 1927) is an important American figurative artist associated with the Pop Art movement. Primarily known for his paintings and prints, Katz utilizes bold simplicity, heightened color, and economy of line to create stylized portraits and landscapes that are defined by their hard-edge and flatness of form. By the mid-1960s, Katz began what would be a prolific career in printmaking, producing more than 400 editions of lithographs, etchings, silkscreens, woodcuts, and linoleum cuts. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Katz studied at The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan under Morris Kantor, where he received his BA in 1949. He later attended summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine. From 1955 to 1959, Katz made small collages of figures in landscapes from hand- colored strips of delicately cut paper. In the late 1950s, he moved towards greater realism in his paintings and began exploring portraiture and monochromatic elements. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s. In the 1980s, Katz took on fashion imagery before focusing his attention on large landscape paintings in the late 1980s and 1990s. During the turn of the century, Katz became returned to his interest in painting flowers. Katz’s first solo show was held in 1954. His work has since been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. The Whitney Museum of American Art organized a retrospective in 1986, and the Brooklyn Museum followed with a print retrospective of Katz’s work in 1988. 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.” The Jewish Museum held an exhibition of his works featuring his wide Ada in 2006. Colby College in Maine holds an extensive collection of Katz’s work. Katz has received numerous accolades throughout his career. Works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Edition of 50 Aquatint

Creator:
Alex Katz (1927, American)
Creation Year:
1957/2008
Dimensions:
Height: 13.75 in (34.93 cm)Width: 19.75 in (50.17 cm)
Medium:
Aquatint
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
1950-1959
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU13021242883

Shop All Alex Katz

Alex Katz

Flat color and minimal forms contrast the often monumental scales of the paintings by Alex Katz through which he creates portraits and landscapes of deceptive simplicity. Although the signature stark style that defines his prints and other work is now recognizable at a glance, it took him a decade to develop. During that time, he has said he destroyed hundreds of paintings.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian émigré parents, Katz’s family moved to Queens when he was a baby and that is where his family’s passion for the arts supported his early creative interests. In 1946, he enrolled at the Cooper Union in Manhattan where he studied painting under Morris Kantor. While he was influenced by the bold colors and hard edges of modernism, he shifted away from the then-dominant Abstract Expressionism movement to figurative scenes of life that have an inherent cool in their pared-down approach. Especially impactful were Katz’s summer studies between 1949 and 1950 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a place where, as he later wrote: “I tried plein air painting and found my subject matter and a reason to devote my life to painting.”

Katz’s first solo show was in 1954 at Roko Gallery in New York. He experimented over the course of the following years with collage and painting on aluminum sheets, with his work in the 1960s drawing inspiration from film and advertising. In the 1970s, Katz expanded into portrait groups that regularly depicted the cultural scene of New York; in the 1980s, he extended his focus to fashion and its supermodels. Since the late 1950s, an enduring muse for his portraits has been his wife, Ada, while others have painted friends and famous figures. The intimate closeness of the frequently cropped faces in Katz’s portraits exudes a sense of tension with the subjects’ enigmatic expressions and planes of color.

In the 1960s, Katz collaborated with American dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor on sets and costumes. His concentration on landscapes emerged in the late 1980s, with atmospheric night views joining his practice, which had previously been defined by bright colors. Always finding new perspectives on his work, he has explored using iPhone photographs as the basis for large-scale compositions in recent years.

Katz’s prolific career has spanned sculpture, prints and public art along with his paintings and drawings, and his works can be found in the collections of leading museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art. He has had over 250 solo exhibitions around the world and continues to be acclaimed. In 2022, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened a major retrospective of his art.

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