BATHING CAP ADA, 2012
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Alex Katz is one of the most innovative leaders in the return to figurative realism and representation among avant-garde artists in America and Europe today. By 1960, very early in Katz’ career, Alex Katz had already found his original and poetic solution to the dilemma of choice between earlier, dominant abstraction and realism by giving primacy to style over subject matter. With considerable brilliance and expressive power, Alex Katz managed to synthesize the artistic impulses of his own era with an earlier modernism, forging elements of Abstract Expressionism with the elegant forms of Manet and Matisse, artists who also explored color and planes, who compressed volume into flatness, and yet evoked convincing weight, movement and the human personality in their paintings. Since the seventies, in particular, Alex Katz’s paintings have drawn attention by reason of their large formats, simple reductions of form, abrupt and unexpected transitions, and for the suggestive metaphors embodied in his subject matter. Alex Katz unique style has managed the difficult feat of reconciling realism not only with mainstream modernism but with post modernism as well.
