Tate St Ives presents
Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow
19 May–23 September 2012
Porthmeor Beach
St Ives
Cornwall TR26 1TG
T 01736 796226
visiting.stives [at] tate.org.uk
Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Katz is one of the most important and respected living American artists. In July 2012 Katz celebrates his 85th birthday, and a career that spans a remarkable six decades. Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition 2012 brings together over 30 canvases and collages from the 1950s to now.
Given the gallery’s location on the beach, and the nature of the summer season here, the exhibition places a special emphasis on Katz’s seascapes and beach scenes, as well as images of family holidays and friends, painted in his own seaside retreat of Lincolnville, Maine, where he continues to spend his summers.
To accompany the show Katz has made a personal selection of works from the Tate Collection. Drawn from British, European, and American artists, he brings together an illuminating cross-generational selection of artists for this special one-room display.
Katz’s paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment. He works in the tradition of European and American artists like Manet, Matisse, and Hopper. Many of Katz’s works picture an everyday America of easy living, leisure, and recreation. Working with the themes of portraiture, landscape, figure studies, marine scenes, and flowers, Katz is influenced as much by style, fashion, and music as he is art history.
In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was still the dominant force in American art when Katz began exhibiting. Whilst his interests were firmly based in the previous generation of artists including Pollock, Rothko, Guston, and De Kooning (De Kooning and Guston in particular offered early support and encouragement), his own painting developed in reaction to their work, and he is acknowledged as a hugely influential precursor to the Pop Art movement with which he became associated throughout the 1960s.
Katz has created an unmistakable language and has remained a prolific painter and an influential and important figure for generations of artists, including now senior painters like David Salle, Peter Halley, and Richard Prince, as well as younger artists like Brian Calvin, Peter Doig, and Elizabeth Peyton.
The catalogue, Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow, with contributions from Martin Clark, Sarah Martin, Alison M Gingeras, and Matthew Higgs, is available.
Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Tate Members, Tate St Ives Members, and the Alex Katz Exhibition Supporters Group.
The exhibition is a collaborative project with Turner Contemporary, Margate, where it will tour 6 October 2012–13 January 2013.
ARTIST ROOMS
ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions and displays are from the collection assembled by Anthony d’Offay. ARTIST ROOMS is owned jointly by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland and was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS On Tour with the Art Fund has been devised to enable this collection to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.
Tate St Ives hours: March–October, daily 10–17.20. Last admission 17. November–February,
Tuesday–Sunday 10–16.20. Last admission 16. Free to 18 and under and members.
*Image above:
Alex Katz, Eleuthera (detail), 1984. Private Collection, Courtesy Galería Javier López, Madrid. Art copyright Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
