Description
ALEX KATZ (Brooklyn, New York, July 24, 1927). "Vincent," 1972. Lithograph on paper. Copy 50/120. Enclosed certificate from the Composition Gallery, Georgia. Signed in the lower left corner. Measurements: 38, 1 x 53,3 cm; 73,5 x 82,5 cm (frame). In this work you can see the portrait of the artist's son who was portrayed on numerous occasions by his father. In fact, in the exhibition that the Guggenheim Museum dedicated to Alex Katz, his son, now an art critic, stated, "What's interesting, you know, being a kid and being portrayed, because you just think it's something you have to do, like, 'How long do I have to pose for this?' And he's very quick at painting. So it's a painless process at all." Alex Katz born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, in 1928 moved with his family to Queens, where. From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. An education that proved instrumental in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that painting outdoors at Skowhegan gave him a reason to dedicate his life to painting. Katz's paintings fall almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscapes. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho), the landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months each year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and leading figures in New York society. His paintings are defined by their flatness of color and form, their economy of line, and their fresh yet evocative emotional detachment. A key source of inspiration is the woodblock prints produced by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television and advertising posters, Katz began to paint large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Most of his works depict close-ups, showing front and back views of the head of the same figure or figures looking at each other from opposite edges of the support. Since 1951, Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally Katz's first solo exhibition was an exhibition of paintings at Roko Gallery in New York in 1954. In 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a retrospective exhibition of paintings and cut-outs entitled Alex Katz in 1986. Katz has had numerous retrospectives at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Staaliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga and Saatchi Gallery, London (1998). Katz's work is in the collections of more than 100 public institutions worldwide, including the Honolulu Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D .C .; Carnegie Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Brandhorst Museum, Munich, among others. Attached is a certificate from the Composition Gallery, Georgia.
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ALEX KATZ (Brooklyn, New York, July 24, 1927).