34 / 138
34
Alex Katz was born in New York in 1927 and is one of the most recognised and widely-exhibited artists of his generation. Often
associated with the Pop Art movement, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated
body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-
century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has
established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface
and consistent economy of line. Utilising characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of colour, and refined compositions,
Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects
of both abstraction and representation”.
His work can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New
York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC;
the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many
others.
Richard Gray Gallery, USA (2016)
37
Alex Katz American (b.1927) Self Portrait (1968)signed & dated top right
pencil on paper
28 x 21.5cm (11 x 8in)
Provenance:
Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New
York (label verso)
Conner Rosenkranz Gallery, New York
(label verso)
Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin (label verso)
Private Collection
Exhibited:
Alex Katz: Small Paintings,
Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin (February -
March 2007)
Alex Katz: Arkansas Arts Centre, Little
Rock (label verso)
€6,000-8,000 (£4,687-6,250)