Alex Katz: People & Places

Alex Katz’s striking and expressive works are among some of the most recognizable images of contemporary art. Adored by collectors and art lovers globally, Katz is renowned for his distinctive figuration and portraiture, alongside expressive landscapes. 

Born in 1927, Katz began his artistic career in the 1950s. Developing his signature ‘flat style’ in the following decade, he arguably revived figurative painting at a time when it had fallen out of style, blending characteristics of Pop Art and Minimalism into an idiosyncratic visual language. 

Distilling only the essential visual elements of his surroundings, Katz evokes the slick nature of advertising billboards through lovely, flat planes of colour. This subtractive methodology strips away visual excess, allowing the artist to depict his subjects–whether human or natural–in austere absolutes.

Approaching 100 years old, the artist is still active and continues to influence contemporary artists through years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper, and sculpture.

Katz typically portrays subjects that he is personally connected to, such as Soho cityscapes, the flora of rural Maine, and the people in his life, particularly his wife and muse, Ada. While Katz is primarily known and revered as a painter, printmaking has always held an essential part of his process, one viewed not as a separate activity but as an integral component of his oeuvre. Prolific in his printmaking, Katz has produced over 400 editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut, and linoleum since the mid-1960s.

In 2022, Katz was the subject of a major retrospective at The Guggenheim (New York), which exhibited work spanning 8 decades of the artist’s career. His work is celebrated in over 100 prominent collections across the globe, including The Tate Modern (London), The National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), among others.