Edited with text by Katherine Brinson. Text by Levi Prombaum, David Breslin, Jennifer Y. Chuong, David Max Horowitz, Arthur Jafa, Katie Kitamura, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Kevin Lotery, Prudence Peiffer.
The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculpture
Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of “absolute awareness” in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katz’s artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist’s work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production. Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist’s practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding “cutouts” and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist’s oeuvre. Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America’s most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide.
'The Cocktail Party' (1965) is reproduced from 'Alex Katz: Gathering.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New York Times
Roberta Smith
It shows us talent, determination and individual sensibility being molded into great art and maintaining its momentum over time. This is what a retrospective should do, and Katz’s work does this with extraordinary clarity, almost transparency. It should give everyone, especially artists, hope.
Washington Post
Sebastian Smee
Katz’s paintings leave you buzzing with the pleasures of social life. Reticent about things best left unsaid, they dare instead to be witty, charming and disarmingly heartfelt. Celebrations of social display, they’re about the joys of seeing and being seen.
Brooklyn Rail
Tom McGlynn
What this retrospective makes clear though, is that Katz remains in a league of his own, defined by his cool regard for the sentimental distance to be found in his own backyard. Perhaps his greatest legacy will be his insistence, via the very acute speech of his paintings, that a global grandeur can be found there.
Hyperallergic
David Carrier
Sometimes a small detail in an artwork can change everything, not just in your sense of that one work, but also in how you view a larger exhibition. That happened to me when I studied the catalogue more closely...Something hidden is hinted at for anyone who looks closely. And what this little detail reveals is that sometimes what is right on the surface can change our understanding of the whole.
New York Review of Books
David Salle
Katz is one of the artists who took the measure of America’s brash immediacy and optimism, its muscularity and its sweetness, and also its isolation and melancholy—the essential loneliness that is the result of trying to flourish amid America’s unresolvable contradictions—and made out of it complex, open-ended, and generous works of art.
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"Mr. and Mrs. R. Padgett, Mr. and Mrs. D. Gallup" (1971) is reproduced from Holiday Gift Staff PickAlex Katz: Gathering, published to accompany the quintessential nonagenarian NYC painter's blockbuster retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. "Presence is … Katz’s game," David Breslin writes. "But instead of conjuring a melancholic present forever haunted by an unfathomable past, he paints one so rippling with life that it does (at least) two notable things. First, it models an attentiveness that is almost Buddhist in its acceptance of time’s flow, an engagement with an idea of change that refuses anything to do with progress; but the paintings, for all of their openness, also maintain a hermeticism and an insularity that banishes even the most empathetic viewer from residing within it. Live your own life, the painting shouts at me! Live it like you’re riding each link in your pulse’s precarious chain!" continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.25 x 11.5 in. / 384 pgs / 360 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $105 GBP £60.00 ISBN: 9780892075607 PUBLISHER: Guggenheim Museum AVAILABLE: 12/13/2022 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Guggenheim Museum. Edited with text by Katherine Brinson. Text by Levi Prombaum, David Breslin, Jennifer Y. Chuong, David Max Horowitz, Arthur Jafa, Katie Kitamura, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Kevin Lotery, Prudence Peiffer.
The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculpture
Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of “absolute awareness” in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katz’s artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist’s work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production.
Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist’s practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding “cutouts” and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist’s oeuvre.
Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America’s most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide.
