Alex Katz

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Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927 in Brooklyn , New York ) is an American painter . His work can be assigned to modern realism and pop art . Much of his pictures 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 district of St. Albans in Queens, New York . His father was a businessman, his mother a stage actress. From 1946 to 1949 Alex Katz studied at the Cooper Union Art School in New York, an art academy that emulated the French avant-garde. He then went to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan , Maine, until 1950 .

His first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Roko Gallery in New York was a failure. In 1960 and 1964 he designed sets and costumes for the Paul Taylor Dance Company's performances at the Spoleto Festival . In 1972 he received a Guggenheim grant for painting. In 1994 Alex Katz was elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design . In the same year, the Cooper Union Art School established a visiting professorship, financed with the proceeds from ten pictures donated by Katz. In April 2001 Alex Katz was a guest fellow at the American Academy in Berlin . He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1988 . He lives in New York and Maine.

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Characteristic of Katz's portraits are larger-than-life busts and heads and their simplified, two-dimensional, almost stencil-like design, whereby the facial expression is reduced to the essentials, similar to advertising posters.

The following galleries and museums in German-speaking countries have works by Alex Katz:

Important exhibitions

literature

  • Ann Beattie: Alex Katz , Harry N. Abrams, New York 1987
  • Kay Heymer: Alex Katz, in your face , catalog for the exhibition in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, 2002
  • Thaddaeus Ropac (Vorw.): Ensemble Moderne. The modern still life. The Still-Life in Modern Art . Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac , Salzburg July 25 to August 31, 1998; Paris September 12 to October 10, 1998, Salzburg, Paris 1998, ISBN 3-901935-03-7 . (German English)
  • Claus Stephani: The flight of the “Yellow Seagull”. Thoughts on an Alex Katz retrospective in the Salzburg Museum der Moderne. In: David. Jewish cultural magazine (Vienna), vol. 25, No. 99, Dec. 2013 ( [1] )
  • G. Bissell: Katz, Alex . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 79, de Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-023184-7 , pp. 416-418.

Movie

In 2002 the German art critic and filmmaker Heinz Peter Schwerfel made a 60-minute film with the title Alex Katz - What about style?

Web links

Commons : Alex Katz  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nationalacademy.org: Living Academicians "K" / Katz, Alex, NA 1994 ( memento of April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on June 28, 2015)
  2. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 16, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Alex Katz, Museum Brandhorst . Retrieved December 6, 2018.
  4. ↑ Alex Katz. Bigger is Better, exhibition in the Ludwig Museum Koblenz . Retrieved February 26, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Katz, Alex
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York