He is 96 years old and still continues to paint with the same amazing sensitivity and tact. Alex Katz, who is distinguished by his broad brush strokes, strong colors and large formats, maintains the vigor and energy of a much younger artist. The years and experience of more than half a century as an artist allow him greater freedom to take pictorial risks. Born in New York in 1927, Katz is one of the most important representatives of American contemporary art.
Considered the inventor of “cool painting”, this artist rescues figurative art with the sharp contours of hard edge and radical flatness that were considered the final point of painting. His simple representations of everyday reality, taken from his comfortable artistic surroundings and the coast of Maine, combine portraiture and landscape with pure abstraction and pop art. Katz works with the sensual reality that surrounds him, although in an abstract and radical way.
The painter spent his childhood in the quiet neighborhood of St. Albans in Queens, not far from where the city meets the Atlantic Ocean on a light-filled coast of salt marshes, small islands and beaches. Surely this landscape has remained engraved in the artist’s mind. His large landscapes, expansive and spontaneous, contain nuances of light, color and composition that escape analysis.
His portraits, on the other hand, often feature large-scale figures with simplified facial features and precise contours. Often, he uses vibrant and contrasting colors to highlight the distinctive features of the subjects of him. This, perhaps, unlike what happens with his landscapes, makes him disturbing as a portrait painter. In Beach stopHowever, both qualities can be observed.
Katz has been painting people by water for forty years. For him, the shore has always been a place of relaxation and informal human sociability. It is also an ennobling place, where the austere horizontality of land and sea and the luminosity of light on the water dignify human presence.
The painter’s beach paintings are in their own way the chronicle of the massive migration of the middle class to the coasts that has been taking place since the 1950s. In addition to a keen eye for coastal sociology, one can observe in these paintings how the The austere horizontality of the land and sea and the luminosity of the light on the water dignify the human presence.
