Alex Katz

Visual artist Alex Katz came of age between abstract expressionism and pop art and began exhibiting his work in 1954. Since that time, he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints, some of which are collaborations with poets, including Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and Ron Padgett. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising.

Over the past five and a half decades, Katz established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear flattened surfaces and a consistent economy of line. By utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swaths of color, and refined compositions, Katz has created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions, including a 2022 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a 2022–23 retrospective at Colby College, and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, among others.