Alex Katz

Alex Katz developed his distinctive approach to representational painting amid the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in 1950s New York. Encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, his practice has spanned more than seven decades, during which he refined a visual language defined by flat planes of colour and carefully balanced compositions. Best known for his large-scale portraits and landscapes, Katz creates images in which simplified figures and tightly cropped forms are set against expansive fields of colour that minimise narrative context and heighten the immediacy of the image. His wife Ada, a recurring subject since the late 1950s, appears throughout his work as both portrait and motif. Further influenced by Henri Matisse, Katz developed a style that prioritises clarity, rhythm and surface over painterly illusion. Across his works, fleeting shifts in light and movement are rendered with remarkable precision, transforming everyday scenes into images of enduring presence.

Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. He studied at the Cooper Union Art School, New York, from 1946 to 1949, before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, between 1949 and 1950. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and has received honours from Cooper Union, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy of Design. His work has been presented in more than 200 solo exhibitions, including major presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; the Serpentine Galleries, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; and a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2022. Selected group exhibitions include presentations at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Katz’s work is held in major public and private collections internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and the Albertina, Vienna. Katz currently lives and works in New York.