The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in
portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and
sculpture
Across 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.
