23/10/17
Interview with Alex Katz
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to Russian parents, Alex
Katz entered the prestigious Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan in 1946,
where he was taught to paint from drawings, and exposed largely to modern art.
Throughout the period of abstract expressionism, Katz remained a staunch
figurative painter, spending his summers in Maine, where he made landscapes en
plein air. In the early 60s, influenced by film, television
and advertising, he began painting large-scale works, with dramatically cropped
faces. His work is often described as “very American”, but Katz seemingly has
no agenda. His motivation is to capture what he sees before him, be it
landscape, cityscape, or portrait, and, unlike many artists, he doesn’t hanker
after timelessness or immortality, recognising, rather, that time keeps moving
and reality doesn’t exist beyond what he terms the “immediate presence”.
For Katz’s latest exhibition in London, gallerist Timothy Taylor
has chosen to bring out some very early pencil and ink drawings made by the artist on the New York subway
during his student days and to show these alongside recent landscape paintings
and sculptures.
Read the interview here