I like to make an image that is so simple you can't avoid it, and so complicated you can't figure it out.
A lex Katz’s distinctly stylized and hyper-specific aesthetic has defined the world of figurative painting of the later half of the twentieth century. Set against a backdrop of crisp lines and Matthieu is a recognizable example of Katz’s iconic mode of portraiture, and most importantly his commitment to revealing the spirit and essence of his sitters.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 and educated at The Cooper Union and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Katz settled on figuration as the primary focus of his artistic output from the beginning of his career. Emerging in the New York art scene of the 1950s, which was dominated by the titans of Abstract Expressionism, Katz brazenly forged his own path, eschewing the passion and primacy of gesture inherent to abstraction, to craft flat, polished scenes, awash in fields of colour that captured the sensation of lived experience. Prefiguring a renewed interest in realist painting, Katz developed his figurative style alongside the Pop artists. Like his contemporaries, he had a strong interest in the vernacular language of popular culture which translated into his paintings. Much in the way Andy Warhol transformed a Campbell’s soup can into an instantly recognisable symbol, Katz transforms his circle of family and friends into visually arresting icons.
In his stunning perception of everyday life, Katz does not seek to create a narrative, but rather a sense of wonder and intrigue, allowing the inscrutable nature of his subject to shine through. Typical of the artist’s work, the shallow spatial plane paired with the apparent inexpressivity of the depicted figure owe much to the crisp manner of commercial art and illustration with further inspiration drawn from film, advertising and fashion. Perfectly articulating Katz's idiosyncratic style, critic Donald Kuspit writes:
"Katz’s portraits are true to the way we experience others. They eloquently convey the tension between the determinate outer appearance and the indeterminate inner reality of someone known only from the outside. Katz seems to make the shell of a person’s outer reality his or her 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.”
This coming Fall, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum will hold a retrospective exhibition of the lifework oeuvre of Alex Katz, inundating the rotonda with the works of this last child of American Realism.
