<p>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, characterised by elegance, simplicity, and stylised 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 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 characterises 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.</p>

Alex Katz

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

<p>One of Katz’s signature works, Flags, presents a close encounter with stalwart iris blossoms in the artist’s characteristic flat rendering. The blossoms, painted in black, are set against a white background, creating a tension that unravels an unexpected utopic garden. The aesthetics of flowers such as flags, tulips and roses have been continuously explored by the artist throughout his career. This Japanese woodcut is another of Katz's exploration of nature, in which the artist offers his study of shapes created by the natural light. Katz's flower shapes are about to merge into abstraction.</p>

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“ I generally start with oil sketches, because I can paint more quickly than I can draw. In this way I try to capture the sensation of what I’m doing, getting into the unconscious and creating the images, and then figuring out what I did. „

—Alex Katz