Alex Katz

Alex Katz is an American painter who is renowned for his figurative paintings which portray the typical portrait in a simplified sense. Katz takes three dimensional environments and attempts to reduce it to the two dimensional surface of the canvas. He achieves this style by reducing the details of the figures and using monochromatic backgrounds, which helps remove the context of the environment. Katz was born in 1927 in New York and went on to study at the Copper Union in New York from 1946 to 1949 and then studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine from 1949 to 1950. He always had the preference of depicting representational figures, such as portraits and landscapes, even through the booming popularity of Abstract Expressionism in the art world during the time. As time went on, Katz further strengthened his simplistic style while also broadening his horizons by working in printmaking, collage and set design. He currently lives and works in New York and Maine.

Katz has reached profound levels of success with being featuring in nearly 500 group exhibitions and over 250 solo exhibitions including  the Whitney Museum of American Art (1986), New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art (1988), New York;  Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1995); and the Saatchi Gallery, London (1998). Additionally his works can be found in over 100 public collections spanning across the world, such as The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Des Moines Art Center; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Finland; Museum Brandhorst, Germany; Fondation Louis Vuitton, France and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japan.