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.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Alex_Katz_Purple_Hat_Ada_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2024.pdf

The "Purple Hat (Ada)", 2017 is a limited edition, focused on the portrait of Ada, Alex Katz's wife and muse, whom Katz has depicted in over 200 pieces, and she is the subject of some of his best, and best-known works. The viewer is greeted with a close up of her porcelain white skin, which depicts whiter in the cold, her piercing almond-shaped eye, and her glamorous red lips. For Katz, she is everything: unattainable beauty and familiar confidant; aloof, unknown model and warm mother. A fashionable woman, matching her wool hat to the lilac geraniums on her scarf.

Alex Katz has said: "She’s both a European beauty and an American beauty. She’s like Dora Maar, the same kind of face, but then her smile is the American-beauty smile".

This "snapshot" is a revisited iconography from Alex Katz's painting "January 2", created in 1992; a work that has also reached high commercial success and accomplished a selling price of $1,700,000 when was offered at Sotheby's auction house in November 2019.

Donald Kuspit once said about Katz´s portraits "Katz seems to make the shell of a person’s outer reality his or own complete substance, as though the person had no inner substance. Yet the quirkiness of Katz’s appearances alludes to that inner substance… For all their everydayness, Katz’s figures have an air of transient strangeness to them, suggesting the mystery of their inner existence, perhaps even to themselves.”

Show all results