The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculpture
Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of "absolute awareness" in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of "quick things passing," compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist's first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katz's artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist's work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production.
Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist's practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding "cutouts" and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist's oeuvre.
Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America's most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide.
Industry Reviews
Katz is one of the artists who took the measure of America's brash immediacy and optimism, its muscularity and its sweetness, and also its isolation and melancholy-the essential loneliness that is the result of trying to flourish amid America's unresolvable contradictions-and made out of it complex, open-ended, and generous works of art. -- David Salle * New York Review of Books *
Sometimes a small detail in an artwork can change everything, not just in your sense of that one work, but also in how you view a larger exhibition. That happened to me when I studied the catalogue more closely...Something hidden is hinted at for anyone who looks closely. And what this little detail reveals is that sometimes what is right on the surface can change our understanding of the whole. -- David Carrier * Hyperallergic *
What this retrospective makes clear though, is that Katz remains in a league of his own, defined by his cool regard for the sentimental distance to be found in his own backyard. Perhaps his greatest legacy will be his insistence, via the very acute speech of his paintings, that a global grandeur can be found there. -- Tom McGlynn * Brooklyn Rail *
Katz's paintings leave you buzzing with the pleasures of social life. Reticent about things best left unsaid, they dare instead to be witty, charming and disarmingly heartfelt. Celebrations of social display, they're about the joys of seeing and being seen. -- Sebastian Smee * Washington Post *
It shows us talent, determination and individual sensibility being molded into great art and maintaining its momentum over time. This is what a retrospective should do, and Katz's work does this with extraordinary clarity, almost transparency. It should give everyone, especially artists, hope. -- Roberta Smith * The New York Times *
