Alex Katz
Alex Katz ( born July 24, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter. His work is attributed to the modern realism and pop art. Most of his images are portraits, but he also created landscapes and architectural images.
Life
Katz was born the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and grew up in the residential area of St. Albans on the New York City borough of Queens. His father was a merchant, his mother a stage actress. From 1946 to 1949 Alex Katz studied at Cooper Union Art School in New York, an art academy, which emulated the French avant-garde. He then went to 1950 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine.
His first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Roko Gallery in New York was a failure. 1960 and 1964 he designed sets and costumes for performances by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Spoleto Festival. In 1972 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting. The Cooper Union Art School taught as a visiting professor in 1994 a financed with the proceeds from sales of donated ten of cat pictures. In April 2001, Alex Katz Visiting Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York and Maine.
Work
Characteristic of the portraits of cat are larger than life busts and heads and their simplified, planar, almost stencil-like design, the facial expression, similar to billboards, is reduced to the essentials.
The following galleries and museums in the German language have works by Alex Katz:
- Germany: New Gallery (Aachen), Altana Cultural Foundation ( Bad Homburg ), Museum Brandhorst (Munich), Dortmunder U ( Dortmund), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin)
- Austria: Essl Museum - Contemporary Art, Albertina Graphic Arts Collection, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation (all in Vienna)
- Switzerland: Musée cantonal des beaux -arts (Lausanne), Daros Foundation ( Zurich )