Alex Katz, Orange Interior, 1968, Silkscreen
Alex Katz One Flight Up
Renowned post-war American painter Alex Katz is instantly recognisable: large scale, pared down and cropped, displaying what Roberta Smith calls his “unique, unorthodox brand of modernism!, which he uses to render scenes from modern life: cocktail parties, beaches, barbeques, as well as landscape, cityscapes and portraits.
White Shirt 1995-96, 9 paintings; oil on canvas
Representative exhibition at the new 600 square metre Timothy Taylor Gallery, in London, features a notable early and rare sculpture One Flight Up, from 1968, in which cut-out heads of Manhattan!s populous party scene are pegged onto one single vast chest-high table. The exhibition will also include the Man in White Shirt series from 1995-1996, Walking on the Beach, 2002 and the recent Winter Landscape, 2006.
A contemporary of Jasper Johns and Elsworth Kelly, Alex Katz became active in the New York art scene in the 1950s> His fluid works combine his admiration for the heroic grandeur of Pollock or Newman, and his interest in the everyday details of life as an attempt to lead the viewer to see the painting in a less local way, or as Robert Rosenblum calls it, “an impossible marriage of the grand and the small, of the epic and the humble”.
Alex Katz -One Flight Up
Timothy Taylor Gallery
15 Carlos Place London W1K 2EX
Alex Katz – Per Contra Interviews
