Alex Katz. This Is Now

Organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Curators: Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Petra Joos, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present Alex Katz. This Is Now, a show that explores the development of landscape in the artist’s career over the last 25 years.

The exhibition features 35 landscapes in which Katz utilizes a “grammar of abstraction,” which includes the expansive allover treatment of his canvases, to capture what he calls “the present tense,” or the simultaneity of vision and awareness. Katz describes this moment as an explosive “flash” just before an image comes into focus.

The show aims to reveal the fundamental but often unacknowledged role that landscape has played in Katz’s long career. Katz’s monumental landscapes are immersive, contemplative paintings that prompt conversations about the confluence of perception and awareness, the relationship between art and nature, and the nature of the sublime in this contemporary moment.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn) is a painter whose work is both fixed in the canon of postwar American art and in the avant-garde of painting today. He emerged in the 1950s as a figurative painter in an age of abstraction, challenging critics who shunned imagery in art, especially figuration. Although he rejected Abstract Expressionism’s abandonment of imagery, Katz did embrace its energy and formal logic. He developed a fast, physically active painting inspired by the action art of Jackson Pollock, whose allover compositions were a revelation. Katz described his goal as the pursuit of capturing “quick things passing” in his work.

Using a shallow pictorial space and lean, reductive, but acutely descriptive lines, Katz aims to initiate a conversation about the confluence of perception and awareness, as well as the relationship between art and nature and the nature of the sublime in this contemporary moment. Although best known for his portraits, Katz has painted landscapes both inside the studio and out-of-doors since the beginning of his career.

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