alex katz
Katz (1927–) studied art at The Cooper Union from 1945 to 1949. His first solo show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954. In the late 1950s, he found himself among a growing number of artists dissatisfied with the then-dominant genre of Abstract Expressionism and, triggered by a summer session of plein-air painting with his friend and colleague Lois Dodd at Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Katz began working more naturalistically. He became increasingly interested in portraiture and painted his friends, and in particular, his wife and muse, Ada.
In 1959, he made his first cutout, which would ultimately develop into a series of flat “sculptures”: freestanding, two-sided portraits that exist in actual space. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began creating large-scale paintings of figures and heads, often dramatically cropped. In 1977, he was commissioned to produce an enormous frieze of 23 multiracial women’s heads, each 20 feet high, wrapped around the RKO General Building at the corner of 42 Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City’s Times Square.
His work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally. He has received numerous awards and his works can be found in private and public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
