“I’m interested in the surface, the flatness, the colors, the shape. That’s what I want to paint.” - Alex Katz
Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) is a seminal figure in postwar American art, renowned for his crisp, iconic portraits and distilled landscapes that bridge realism, abstraction, and Pop. Trained at Cooper Union and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Katz forged a distinctive visual language in the 1950s—boldly figurative and strikingly flat—at a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated. Over a career spanning seven decades, he has remained dedicated to the immediacy of perception, capturing the fleeting elegance of the everyday with cool precision and graphic clarity. Katz’s pared-down compositions, often featuring his wife Ada, close friends, or sunlit scenes from Maine, are not about narrative but presence—striving to evoke the sensation of seeing in real time. His motivation lies in distilling the moment: a gesture, a glance, a flicker of light—rendered timeless through style, surface, and scale.