CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/2/2022

Presence and attentiveness in 'Alex Katz: Gathering'

"Mr. and Mrs. R. Padgett, Mr. and Mrs. D. Gallup" (1971) is reproduced from Holiday Gift Staff Pick Alex 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!"