Open Alex Katz's official website and you'll be greeted by brightly colored flowers. Orange, bright yellow, light purple, the petals flutter like a bright and brisk summer prelude. Created in 2010, Wildflowers 1 features minimalist brushstrokes, flat-painted colors, and a large, solid-colored background that goes out of field, presenting Katz's most well-known visual vocabulary as a pioneer of pop art.
《Wildflowers 1》，2010
In the Seoul-based exhibition hall of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, the work attracts attention with its huge scale (243.8 × 304 .8cm). It is reminiscent of what Katz has called "ambient" landscape paintings since the 1990s, and their sheer scale seems to envelop and envelop the viewer.
Above: Artist Alex Katz in a studio
Pictured in middle and below: Katz's solo exhibition "Flowers" at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Seoul. Photo by Chunho An
However, when it comes to this American contemporary artist in his nineties, the first thing that comes to mind may not be these brightly colored flowers. Flattened heads are the most common imagery in Katz's paintings, cut and composed in a cinematic close-up; women dressed in fashionably dressed as if they came from old advertising posters, vivid social scenes that illustrate the prosperity of the middle class; and his wife and muse Ada, who met at the opening of a gallery in New York in 1957 and have created more than 250 portraits of her over the next 60 years.
Katz with his wife Ada
Various portraits painted by Katz for his wife Ada
Large-scale landscapes are also Katz's favorite creations—they record the fleeting moments of nature in an indescribable sense of immediacy and movement, and together with those portraits, convey a certain peaceful and distant poetry.
Katz has said that his floral collection is also related to his group portraits throughout the 1960s – overlapping flowers like heads at cocktail parties, allowing him to explore the sense of movement and the "immediate presence" he has sought in his more than seven decades of creative career; and the swaying scattered branches resemble sparse trees in the wilderness, and the way in which he paints objects is also the "outer light school" in his landscape paintings. The drawing method has a similar rhythm.
《Wild Spring Flowers 2》，2020
《Irises》，2011
《Yellow Tulips》，2014
《Day Lily 1》, 1969
At the age of 95, Katz will welcome Solomon M. The R. Guggenheim Museum holds a major solo retrospective for him. Like the minimalist shapes and bright tones in the picture, Katz's answers in the interview were always concise and crisp — when asked what he expected from the retrospective, he left behind such a simple sentence: "Loved by everyone." ”
🌹🌷💐
In one of those interviews, Alex Katz recalled his first painting. He was 16 years old and painted the Gulf of Jamaica in front of him, where he was the night watchman. "It was a great job." he said.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927, Katz moved with his family to St Albans, a diverse community in Queens, at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1928. He grew up in a Jewish family of Russian immigrants and studied at the Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan, New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Katz's studio
A pioneer of pop art, katz is fond of comparing Katz to David Hockney's paintings, but the two are created in very different ways. Katz's creation is a reproduction of the modern life of the American middle class around him, reminiscent of Ann Beattie's The New Yorker Tales, which is inspired by the East, the Ukiyo-e painter Kitagawa Utamaro of japan's Edo period. Along with Katsushika Hokusai and Hirose Ando, Kitagawa was also the first Japanese woodblock printmaker to be popular in the West, influencing a generation of artists to think about graphic art forms. As a member of the New York School, Katz, who rose to prominence in the 1950s, responded to the wave of Abstract Expressionism at that time, and with its highly stylized aesthetics, he found his own unique solution between formalism and expressionism.
Katz's early prints Cat in Chair, 1954; Danny and Laura, 1986; Carter and Phyllis, 1986.
Lee Jin-ming, a Korean art critic who curated a solo exhibition of the same name at the Daegu Museum of Art for Katz, summarized the background of his art in three aspects in his article "Alex Katz: A Living Master in the History of Contemporary Painting" into three aspects: First, the cultural atmosphere at that time exalted pure formalism. And this modernist philosophy is a strong opposition to art that expresses different ideas; secondly, the exploration of the "unconscious" of the human mind through psychoanalysis, a methodology that is increasingly popular in the painting world—everyday life belongs to the realm of "conscious" and "unconscious" thinking can enter the opposite world; and the defenders of the idea of "art for art's sake" have great power—all of which bring multiple dilemmas to the development of figurative painting.
Abstract Expressionism, represented by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, and even the more minimalist Monochrome, dominated the art world at that time, and it was clear that Katz's appearance went against the current.
《Round Hill》, 1977
《Summer Picnic》，1975
《Five Women》, 1977
Inspired by films, advertising posters, music, poetry, etc., as well as intimate relationships between friends and family, Katz ignored the trends of the time and extended his own methodology: that is, the use of flat images, simple lines and vivid and bright tones to present portraits and landscapes, with his own attention to daily life and great enthusiasm for figurative forming, reconciling the pursuit of spirituality and metaphysics in abstract painting. These motifs have sharp and clean silhouettes, radical and bold compositions and cuts, while providing the viewer with a certain perceptual extension.
《Good Morning》,1975
《Good Afternoon》，1974
"We're just vying for favors, and I'm going to let my work knock abstract expressionists off the wall." Katz once said bluntly in an interview. He confessed that he was a very competitive person: "On the one hand, I am competing with the children who are painting at the moment, and at the same time, I am also competing with the old guys. The "freshness" in the young man's work keeps him on guard, while he continues to try to "produce something that has enough substance" in the face of his old rivals.
《Tracy》, 2013
《Moose》，2013
"When you're painting, all you think about is painting, canvas, and what you're presenting on it. But there must also be something that drives you (forward), yes. And this "competitive spirit" has been one of the important drivers of Katz's creation for many years.
He was reluctant to devote himself to a particular style or genre, such as Minimalism — "I started hard edge painting in 1954, when the Minimalist movement was far from over. He also didn't want to limit himself to pop art—"When I created pop culture themes, I also predateed the birth of pop art." ”
《The Green Cap》, 1985
《Ulla in Black Hat》, 2010
《Blue Umbrella 2》, 2020
🌸🌼🌻
Katz began painting flowers in the mid-1950s, and in his view, flowers are painted in a way that is consistent with wilderness landscapes, as distinct from the enclosed objects of Picasso or Matisse. "Flowers are more like Jackson Pollocks — they're open. The flowers are beautiful, very common, and really difficult to draw. ”
At his summer vacation home in Maine, Katz first began sketching vases on a rainy day. He trimmed some flowers into the bottle and began sketching. Even years later, he continued to work in the same way, but he became interested in the flowers themselves compared to vases.
《Yellow Flags》, 2011
《Yellow Flags 3》, 2020
The current exhibition at the Seoul space of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery presents works that Katz has not seen in three floral collections in the past 20 years, including his latest paintings during the COVID-19 pandemic. As in his work during the 1950s, Katz continues to sketch flowers in his studio in his recent floral paintings. He lived a very simple life during the pandemic – "painting, sleeping, going on and on and on." He studied the structure of the flowers and quickly sketched them out on canvas with colored oil paint—"that was unconscious, unthinking, all in one go." He described it this way. In this special period of the global pandemic, the new floral collection represents Katz's inner "encouragement to the world around him".
Katz's solo exhibition "Flowers" at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Seoul. Photo by Chunho An
Katz has said that his experience at Skohigen taught him to sketch landscapes – which was crucial to his professional development as a painter and is still a staple of his artistic practice today, especially in the creation of landscape paintings. The "plein air painting" (meaning "outdoor" in French) from the European Impressionist masters gave him "a reason to dedicate my life to painting".
Continuing the outer light school's approach to painting, Katz's penchant for creating in nature allows him to directly capture the light and atmosphere that give the flowers bright colors. He quickly sketched outdoors and then moved it to a larger canvas in the studio. "Outer Light Painting gave me an opportunity to paint unconsciously." He said in the interview. Thus, although hailed as a pioneer of Popism, the essential difference between Katz and his contemporaries such as Andy Warhol is evident – Katz's work is deeply rooted in the European tradition of painting.
"Rhododendron on Orange" is on display
In his new works Peony and Rhododendron on Orange, created in 2020, Katz began to use more shadows to portray the floral volume, giving it a stronger Baroque feel than the previous flat painting style. "In recent years, I feel that my art has moved from the original lyrical art to a more classic art." He said.
"The basic premise of my creation is almost unchanging, but the solution changes. In painting, no solution remains effective after a certain period of time; it becomes obsolete. In my mind, if I can't get it right, it's constantly changing. ”
《Blue Flags》, 2014
《White Roses》, 2014
What will never change is his focus on the "now." In Katz's usual "wet on wet" approach, he was quick to create —the last paint had to be applied before the first paint dried, filling the entire picture with an "immediacy." This sense of immediacy is also reflected in the composition of his floral works – like portraits, Katz's floral compositions are cut in a bold way, and the magnified flowers reveal a calm, elegant and powerful beauty that immerses the viewer in the "now" depicted by the artist. This "immediate presence" is crucial to him: "Everything is moving. Reality doesn't exist, it's moving. Reality is subject to what is fashionable, so what you get has no past tense, no future tense, only the present. In Katz's view, immediacy attracts itself because of its "powerful energy," and I wanted to paint it. That's what exists instantly. This is consciousness. ”
《Dog On The Beach》，1927
《Ada and Louise》，1927
Gaining a keen interest in jackson Pollock's way of applying paint and Pierre Bonnard's use of color, Katz entered the landscape painting industry, creating a large number of landscape paintings in the early 1950s, a subject that continued for many years. Since the 1990s, he has also begun to create large-scale, "environmental" landscapes. Even though landscapes and flowers are his favorite subjects, Katz admits that he is not a person close to nature in life. "Nature is just a form." He said.
《Blueberry Field》, 1968
《Late July 1》，1971
《Swamp Maple 1》, 1970
The content of the picture is not important, he tries to be as detached from it as possible; style is content – this is the core of his work for more than seventy years. "The lines, the colors, and how they all come together. Ultimately, the content doesn't matter. Style is the most important thing. His work remains painterly, while always basing itself on the observation of reality–in Katz's view, his painting language is "abstract" and his basic goal is to "create seemingly realistic scenes".
《Yellow Barn》, 2009
《Red Sails》, 2008
《Four Poplars Study 2》, 2019
A style between abstraction and figuration is perhaps the most apt interpretation of Katz's paintings, and he once said: "The realist painters do not understand what I am doing, and the abstracts do not understand." I'm somewhere in between. Or maybe for him, abstraction and figuration are not the focus, but "the surface of painting" is everything - in this surface, the concrete scenery is reduced to refreshing lines and color blocks, and the light from nature enters the field of vision in an instant... The act of painting itself surpasses the idea of painting in speed, and he unconsciously strokes his brush to describe, which is his style and the "freedom" he pursues in his heart.
Exhibition Space Photo: Chunho An
Author: Xia Han
Editor: Sheng Wenjia
New Media Editor: Hanxi
Some of the images are from the artist's website