Alex Katz

(American, born 1927)

Alex Katz is a contemporary American artist renowned for his large-format paintings of landscapes, flowers, and portraits of his wife Ada. Katz’s flattened forms and simplification of detail are trademarks of works such as Gray Day (1992). “We compete for audiences, as artists. I'm competing with the Abstract Expressionist guys. I'll knock ‘em off the wall,” he once remarked. “If you put my work next to an aggressive A.E. painting, I'll eat most of ‘em up. And I want to compete with the kids. I'm there with the kids.” Born on July 24, 1927 in Brooklyn, NY, as a young man, he attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. It was here that the artist first began to make plein-air paintings of the Maine landscape. During the mid-1950s, Katz fell into the small circle of artists known as the 10th Street Scene, which included Lois Dodd, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, among others. Over the following decades, he developed his hallmark style of painting while also experimenting with collage, printmaking, and painted aluminum cutouts. His work has served as a beacon of style to younger generations of artists, including Elizabeth Peyton and Julian Opie. Katz maintains residences in Lincolnville, ME, and New York, NY. Today, his works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, ME, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., among others.