Alex Katz (American, born 1927) is the outstanding protagonist of figurative painting and one of our era's most acclaimed artists. In the late 1950s, the artist began to develop his mature style, characterized by elegance, simplicity, and stylized abstraction, which typifies his entire production. Alex Katz’s paintings are the result of a transformation of the three-dimensional world into simplified landscapes and portraits. He chooses to minimize details and shading and to present bold contours and blocks of colour. Indeed, Alex Katz’s art captures the appearances and transposes them into paintings. Alex Katz’s portraits feature his own social milieu – friends, fellow artists, and most notably his wife Ada, whom he has painted more than 200 times. The artist’s quest to represent the experience of spectatorship is reflected in his portraits, also in his large landscapes, which he characterizes as “environmental”. In his continued experimentation with different media, the artist creates what he calls “cut-outs”, freestanding sculptures that blur the line between painting and object. Back in 1965, Katz began experimenting with printmaking, which became a key aspect of his artistic practice. Alex Katz’s prints, which vary from lithographs, etchings, and silkscreens to linoleum cuts, have been exhibited in major museums, such as the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which, in 2010, showed a retrospective survey of over 150 graphic works, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in an exhibition in 2012. The transposition of his notable paintings into prints allows Alex Katz to make his art more accessible to his collectors, thereby maintaining the same allure and stylish power as his painted works.

Alex Katz

With flat planes of rich, lovely color, Alex Katz’s landscapes and portraits evoke the smooth aesthetics of advertising billboards and film.

The Black Dress has been a recurrent theme in Alex Katz' work since the very beginnings. The theme of the edition goes back to one of his most iconic early paintings, which is indeed titled "Black Dress" and depicts 6 different perspectives of a woman wearing a classical, Breakfast-at-Tiffany like black shift dress. This paintings dates from 1960 and is owned by the Brandhorst collection in Munich. The actual composition for the edition refers to the original painting "Black dress" from 2010.

Carmen is part of the "Black Dress" series of 9 life size screen prints of the main women Katz has painted over the years. She poses leaning against a yellow background and wearing a unique style of a little black dress, looking confident and elegant, classy but at the same time almost snobbish. The model, Carmen, has all of Katz' main themes in it: the Black Dress, the Women, the Black and Yellow color blocking, the seriality and the coolness with which Katz portraits his models.

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