Alex Katz: Gathering

OCT 21, 2022–FEB 20, 2023

A major retrospective exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the city where Katz spent his life. The exhibition is displayed in a spiral-shaped space designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, which fills the entire space. Boldly displayed at an entrance separate from the exhibition hall is a portrait of Katz's wife, Ada, holding an umbrella in the rain. The piece sold at Phillips Auction in 2019 for approximately $470 million, breaking Katz's auction record at the time. Katz has painted more than 250 portraits of Ada to date.
The exhibition begins with works from the late 1940s, including sketches of people riding the New York subway, to his first solo exhibition in the 1950s, and from the midpoint of the exhibition, a number of portraits and cutout sculptures composed in his unique style of transparent colors and boldly cropped compositions, and other representative works are The second half of the exhibition features all-over paintings. The second half of the exhibition consists mainly of landscapes from flowers and plants painted in an all-over style. After the spiral exhibition, the final section of the exhibition is a selection of recent works, including a recent painting of water surfaces from 2022, which is on display throughout the Guggenheim Museum.
The spiral exhibition is a unique opportunity to look back on the artist's 80-year life, from the 1940s, when he began his creative activities, to 2022, the present day.

Alex Katz

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927 and grew up in St. Albans, Queens. 1946-1949, he studied at Cooper Union College in New York, and from 1949-1950 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he was exposed to painting from real objects. exposure to the real, which is the mainstay of his practice today.
Katz admits that in his first decade as a painter, he destroyed 1,000 paintings to find his style, and through them he arrived at his style.
Katz is known for his flat portraits of familiar figures, such as his wife Ada and friends, on monochromatic backgrounds, and his botanical and landscape paintings composed entirely on the screen, characterized by transparent colors and boldly cropped compositions, whose bold, simple colors are now seen as a precursor to Pop Art.
In 1954, he had his first solo exhibition at the Rocco Gallery in New York City; in 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented "Alex Katz Prints," followed by a traveling Alex Katz retrospective in 1986. His work is also in the collections of the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.