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Pace Wildenstein- 22nd St.

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Exhibition Detail Alex Katz Alex Katz Pace Wildenstein- 22nd St. 545 W.22nd St. New York, NY 10001 April 24th - June 13th Opening: April 23rd 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
	Alex Katz, Sunset 5, 2008 , oil on linen, 274.3 cm x 487.7 cm/ 9' x 16' © Pace Wildenstein- 22nd St.

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> DESCRIPTION

PaceWildenstein is pleased to present a new series of large-scale paintings on linen and canvas from 2004-2008 by Alex Katz. The show features approximately ten landscape paintings captured at twilight and sunset. Katz’s painting was central to the development of a new realism in the early 60s and today he remains one of the leading artists of his generation. Although primarily known for his large-scale flat portraiture, the artist has been painting from nature since the early 1950s.

Alex Katz once described his subjects as “quick things passing”—an idea that he embraced early in his career while studying plein air painting at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine the summer following his graduation from The Cooper Union in 1949. The northern New England environment captivated Katz and he has returned every summer to the Maine coast. In 1954 he began living and working in a 19^th-century yellow clapboard farmhouse. The house and its surroundings have been the subject of numerous paintings over the years. In his new paintings at PaceWildenstein, Katz captures the Maine light,“which is richer and darker than the light in Impressionist paintings,” Katz once explained, that “helped me separate myself from European painting and find my own eyes.”

Katz has painted the Maine light falling beyond tree branches throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, capturing the ever-changing light in the cycles of the day and seasons in a succession of instant moments.“For some of the twilight paintings,” Katz recalls, “I remember sitting all day waiting for that interval around 8:45 pm. I’d put down the coffee and paint for just those fifteen minutes. Later I’d try to figure out what I’d done, and on that basis do another, and a third, and a fourth.”

The technique of painting directly from life that Katz learned at Skowhegan has remained central to his practice today. From his summers in Maine, his studio in New York, and the friends, family and culture that surround him, Katz paints what he sees. His first night painting, Wet Evening (1986), portrayed the ever-glowing city lights of Manhattan’s skyline. Other urban night scenes, including such seminal works as Varick(1988) and his more recent variations from 2008, Varick 1 and Varick 2, have reappeared throughout his career. “From photography I can’t get any colours and I can’t get the light I’m interested in,” the artist once remarked; “I want to go into areas where no one’s been in terms of time: at twilight, you get ten or fifteen minutes.”

Katz’s exhibition at PaceWildenstein coincides with Alex Katz: Reflections at the Museo delle Arti di Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy (on view through September 27, 2009) and with Alex Katz: An American Way of Seeing at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, on view through May 30, 2009, which will travel to the Musée de Grenoble, France and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany through 2010. In addition, Alex Katz: Seeing, Drawing, Making, previously on view at The Gallery at Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida, will open at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, in February 2010.

Later this month, Katz will be honored with The Medal Award from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and will also be among the first 150 members inducted into The Cooper Union Alumni Hall of Fame.

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