Alex Katz was born in New York in 1927. In 1946 he began to study painting at The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan. At an early stage he developed motifs from the artistic genres portrait painting and landscape painting, which still characterize his work today.

Katz prefers the large-scale format, which is an indicator for the immediacy of his motifs and for the formal continuation of the creative principles of advertisement. That has become his typical form of depiction. In this way, the landscape paintings convey the beholder a feeling of being surrounded by nature. Portrait painting means to Katz depicting the instantaneous presence, a snapshot of a moment in time, like photography. The portrait subjects seem to come very close to the beholder. However, they are between the poles of closeness and restraint. So, they never unfold their personalities and also keep distance.

In his graphic oeuvre, Katz increases the radiance of his paintings in various graphic techniques like screen print, lithography, etching as well as lino- or woodcuts. Each of these techniques is part of his artistic mastership, and he constantly improves them together with his master-printers.

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Image: Alex Katz, Nicole, 2018, Lithograph, Woodcut, Screenprint