Alex Katz

(New York, 1927)

Author's artworks
20th-21st Century. USA

Alex Katz was born in 1927 in New York to Russian parents with a strong inclination towards art and poetry. This environment favoured young Katz’s interest in art, and he started training at The Cooper Union in his home city in 1946. Three years later, after finishing the first phase of his education, he received a grant to study at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Madison, Maine), where he became familiar with open-air painting, something that added a new dimension to his art.

In 1954 he exhibited his work for the first time at Roko Gallery, New York, in what was to be the first in a long string of exhibitions. During the course of his life, Alex Katz’s practice has gone through an ongoing process of renewal, experimenting with many techniques, like
, sculpture, painting and, from 1965, printing. Thematically speaking, landscape and portraiture, both individual and in group, were the main focus of his work, influenced by his passion for photography and cinema. His paintings are also shaped by the aesthetics of advertising, in a tacit acknowledgement of the consumerist society in which he lived.

Alex Katz’s work has been recognised with several distinctions and can be found in the collections of major museums worldwide, including, among others, MoMA and Metropolitan Museum in New York; Tate Gallery, in London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; and Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, IVAM, in Valencia.