'Homage to Degas' by Alex Katz is an archival pigment ink print on Innova Etching Cotton Rag 315 gsm fine art paper. This lively work reflects Katz’s signature style, with...
'Homage to Degas' by Alex Katz is an archival pigment ink print on Innova Etching Cotton Rag 315 gsm fine art paper. This lively work reflects Katz’s signature style, with bold and colorful two-dimensional strokes and ‘up close’ portraiture. Katz’s work captures ephemeral moments, like fragments from a poem, his pieces translate feeling. This print was created in 2020 and is signed and numbered by the Artist in pencil on the lower front corner. This stunning work comes in a custom-made white satin lacquer frame and is finished with museum caliber non-glare UV protective glass.
KATZ was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927 to grow up with immigrant parents in a suburb where throughout his high-school years he was able to attend a specialized program dedicated to the arts. Kats went on to attend college in 1946 at Cooper Union in Manhattan. Katz studied painting and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a grant that he would renew the following summer. During his years at Cooper Union, Katz had been exposed primarily to modern art and was taught to paint from drawings. Kats was encouraged to paint from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.” Katz’s first one-person show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954, he was immersed in the New York scene where he made many important connections with fellow painters and collectors. In the late 1950s, he made a decision to attempt greater realism in his paintings. He became interested in portraiture and in particular his wife and muse, Ada. Katz began using monochrome backgrounds, which would become a defining characteristic of his style, anticipating Pop Art and separating him from gestural figure painters and the New Perceptual Realism. In 1959, Katz made his first painted cutout and soon, he began painting them directly onto the cut wood. In the 1960s, he shifted to painting directly on shaped aluminum sheets, a practice which has continued throughout his career, forming a series of freestanding or wall-mounted portraits that exist in actual space. Influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut. After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. In the 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings, which he characterizes as “environmental.” Rather than observing a scene from afar, the viewer feels enveloped by nearby nature. At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also began painting flowers in profusion, covering canvases in blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s. The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz, which opened in 1996, presents ongoing exhibitions of its in-depth collection of Katz’s paintings, cutouts, drawings, and prints, made possible through the generosity of then Colby trustee Paul J. Schupf and the personal donations of works by Katz himself. The Schupf Wing is one of the few wings of a museum in the United States devoted solely to the work of a single living artist. Beginning in 2010, Katz literally re-framed his subject matter by employing more drastic cropping of the individual portraits. In the same vein he began composing paintings using multiple tightly cropped images of the same subject sequenced across the canvas similar to a filmstrip, but with the-non chronological variations in angle creating the impression of an environmental portrait. Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951. Katz has received numerous accolades throughout his career. In 2007, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York. In 2005, Katz was the honored artist at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series. The same year, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Colgate University, Hamilton, New York— his second Honorary Doctorate, following one from Colby College, Maine, in 1984. Katz was named the Philip Morris Distinguished Artist at the American Academy in Berlin in 2001 and received the Cooper Union Annual Artist of the City Award in 2000. Works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. In 1968, Katz moved to an artists’ cooperative building in SoHo, New York City, where he has lived and worked ever since. He continues to spend his summers in Lincolnville, Maine.
To learn more about this artist and see other available artworks, please visit our website: www.artoncontemporary.com/alex-katz