"I can't think of anything more exciting than the surface of things. Just appearance."
A leading figure in minimalist realism across the 20th and 21st centuries, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) began his formal art education at The Cooper Union in 1946, graduating in 1949. That same year, he received a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he immersed himself in plein air painting. Working outdoors and from life brought a sense of instinctive freedom and immediacy to his practice—qualities that continue to define his work.
Katz’s early paintings were primarily landscapes, a number of which were featured in his first solo exhibition at Roko Gallery in 1954. During this time, he became involved in the 10th Street scene, where exposure to a more “open” figurative artistic language inspired him to forge a modern approach to realism. Drawing from his modernist training, traditional techniques, and the direct painting methods he had refined at Skowhegan, Katz developed a distinctive style. His work emphasized color and shape over extraneous detail, explored surface and flatness, and created a compelling tension between two- and three-dimensional space—setting it apart from the dominant Gestural Abstraction of the era.
Katz’s cropped, flattened compositions and vibrant, unmodulated color fields became his hallmark. His portraits, often depicting isolated figures against monochromatic or simplified backgrounds, strip away specificity to focus on the subject’s essence. This minimalist approach, combined with a bold palette, positions Katz as a precursor to Pop Art. His work captures not just the appearance but the presence and individuality of his subjects. In recognition of his lasting influence and singular vision, the Guggenheim Museum presented a major retrospective of Katz’s work in 2023—affirming his legacy as a pioneering force in contemporary American art
Works by Alex Katz are found in major private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Museum Brandhorst, Munich.