Kunsthalle Tübingen:

Because of the distinctively cool and reductive style in which he has portrayed everyday life and his immediate surroundings, the artist, who was born in New York in 1927, has often been associated with Pop Art. But Alex Katz is more than that. He is a transcendental realist who, for meantime 70 years, has been transposing experiences with reality into the medium of painting. Katz registers both what literally catches his eye and what appeals to his senses and emotions, in a scene or a place that he later transfers to canvas using a swift painting style. People close to him, such as, for example, his family, friends, pets, or a tree on the street, are thus rescued from the flow of time and find an emotionally distanced expression in his works.

Since the 1980s Alex Katz has been preoccupied not only with portraits, but above all with depictions of nature and urban scenes. His contemplative nature scenes are not primarily about projecting his own emotions onto a subject. Instead, through recurring motifs such as the tree, the window or a landscape, Alex Katz puts himself to the test of depicting light and atmosphere. With a sensitive gift of observation and a physically rooted sense of perception, he captures the magic of the moment and in doing so lends expression not least to the essence of things in an unembellished painterly way.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen has been mounted in close collaboration with the artist and provides a long overdue survey of Alex Katz’s late oeuvre based on archetypal work groups. Along with paintings and prints dating from the 1990s, the exhibition mainly focuses on his latest groups of works. In spontaneous and expressive paintings, Alex Katz presents himself today from a less distant standpoint. Instead, in a sensually direct way, he gives himself up to the flow of painting, fathoming the limits of abstraction in large-format gestural works.