ALEX KATZ - Works and History

Alex Katz (*1927) is an american figurative painter, sculptor and graphic artist.

He is considered a pioneer of Pop Art. His colorful paintings with monochrome backgrounds often depict humans and nature. Those figures are reminiscent of advertising motifs because of their stencil-like appearance.

Katz’s works range from large landscapes to sea impressions to flower illustrations. Most of his works are characterized through oversized heads and breast images that seem frozen in a snapshot. The artists wife Ada is his favorite model and has been a subject of his striking compositions for 60 years.

Alex Katz is born in Brooklyn. His father was a businessman and his mother was an actress. He studied at the New Yorker Cooper Union Art School from 1946 to 1949 and afterwards at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1972 he received the Guggenheim-scholarship for painting.

Katz looks back on 200 solo exhibitions and almost 500 group exhibitions in Europe, the United States and Asia. You can find his works in international collections, to name a few: Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the Albertina in Vienna, in the Tate Gallery in London, in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and in the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden.

Alex Katz lives and works in New York and Maine.