With flat planes of rich, lovely color, Alex Katz’s landscapes and portraits evoke the smooth aesthetics of advertising billboards and film. The prolific artist is especially well known for his paintings of Ada, his wife and muse. Katz developed his signature style as a reaction against the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the mid–20th century, when he began painting. Instead, he embraced narrative, figurative clarity and the accessible pleasures of Pop art, though he remains untethered to any particular school or movement. Katz studied at Cooper Union in New York and spent a summer learning plein air painting at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before he began presenting regularly in New York and cities across the world. His work has been included in shows at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai, among others. His work belongs to multiple public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Tate, and has fetched million-dollar prices on the secondary market.
