Tate Liverpool
23 November 2018 – 10 March 2019
Alex Katz
Pansies (1967)
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland
Tate Liverpool presents work by Alex Katz (b. 1927), one of the most important and respected living American artists of the past 50 years.
This exhibition draws from ARTIST ROOMS, a touring collection of over 1,600 works of modern and contemporary art by more than 40 major artists, jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. The collection is displayed across the UK through a touring programme, supported by Arts Council England, Art Fund and Creative Scotland.
With their bright and bold palette, Katz’s paintings present a modern American take on the classical themes of landscapes, marine scenes and flowers. His immediately recognisable style draws on American and European painting traditions including the work of Matisse and Monet. At the same time, the crisp stylised surfaces of his paintings have an affinity with pop art.
With a remarkable career spanning six decades, ARTIST ROOMS: Alex Katz presents a focused selection of 19 landscape paintings made between 1967 and the late 1990s drawn from the ARTIST ROOMS collection. Primarily working from life, Katz produces painted images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed brush strokes and planes of flat colour. As well as large-scale paintings, he has consistently made smaller paintings primarily as studies, which are also considered to be a distinct body of work and will be included in the display.
These modestly-scaled paintings, including Tulips 1969 and 3 PM, November 1997 show the influence of Japanese painting, capturing a fleeting nature scene expressed through a minimal amount of painted expression. Works such as Black Brook 1988 express an immersive, more physical encounter with the natural landscape. Katz himself describes such works as ‘environmental’, their large-scale is essential to the function and viewer’s encounter with the work.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Katz began working in the 1950s and initially focused on portrait and figurative subjects, at odds with the predominant abstract non-representational style of the period. Katz gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with many younger artists such as Peter Doig (b. 1959), Marlene Dumas (b. 1953), and Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) citing his work as an influence.
ARTIST ROOMS: Alex Katz is curated by Darren Pih, Exhibitions & Displays Curator.