The Thyssen Museum hosts the first Spanish retrospective of Alex Katz

Madrid, 06/11/2022

We usually associate Alex Katz’s art with intelligent seduction: he is the author of portraits of flat, optimistic characters, usually lethargic and drawn with a schematic approach that also eludes his fears, black clouds; Also for the landscapes in which he combined both the nature observed through his eyes and that which he observed indoors simultaneously, which is why the American describes these pieces as capturing a flash before his gaze focuses on the image.

The painter was a precursor to clean formation in his early days, while the abstract expressionist works triumphed in the United States, who poured his inner life on huge canvases without spaces (Bullock Everything changed, He says). However, he had something in common with them, essentially developing a physical and fast board, even though the formation in his case wasn’t automatic at all. next to pop art But without being associated with it, he chose to cultivate a work that is as attractive as it is far from substantive, aesthetic, and of course emotional excesses.

Katz has starred in many exhibitions in Spain, in part, some of which were Javier Lopez and Galerie Ferry Francis, but now when Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum Presents his first anthology In Our Country, curated by Guillermo Solana and curated in collaboration with the author himself, who is 94 years old still active and admits that he feels like wasting time when he is away from his studio, but not when he is not necessarily working: he considers that thinking and benefiting Free time is part of his operations.

The tour is fed by 35 large-format oil paintings, including individual and group paintings, landscapes and flowers, as well as some studies, and these works are dated between 1959 and 2018, so we can pay attention to their development, which at first glance is not very noticeable ( She has maintained her interest for the same reasons, sometimes the same ideas), but it manifests itself in adopting new approaches to it.

He would be at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where Katz trained after passing through the Woodrow Wilson Institute and the Cooper Union in Manhattan, advising him to delve deeper into the representation of nature, a proposition he had always adhered to because he felt that at the time they gave him, as he put it, A reason to dedicate his life to painting. In the early 1950s, he settled in Manhattan, making a living in a framing company and making murals, but soon began showing off: with his first wife, Jan Cohen, in 1951, and already united in 1954.

This decade of the 1950s marked the artist with creative skepticism until he gradually made painting a field for his play, always from a non-psychological perspective, paying attention to the essential aspect of the characters and leaving aside potential emotional implications. . At first, his models were close friends and his second wife Ada Moreau. In fact, he dedicated nearly a thousand photographs to it and, early on, also made flat monochrome backgrounds his hallmark, so that subjects were placed in bare spaces lacking references, even light sources.

Later, under the influence of cinema and the aesthetics of billboards and with the aim of giving his figurative work the dimensions of expressive abstract paintings, the volume of his compositions increased. The change brought necessary shifts in the processing of faces, with segmented features, raised from modified or heavily cropped frames, as in works far in time. red smile (1963) and red coat (1982). It is no coincidence that in the late 1970s he was commissioned to create a mural for Times Square to rival his advertising: it was nine womenmade up of about twenty close-up shots of females, and Katz’s discovery that his painting was as powerful as the propaganda in that setting was a very intense experience.

Delving into the possibilities of his images, he would implement those images of a dual or multiple nature. He then wished not to delve into the character of his chosen one, nor into the evolution of their traits over time, but to view them from different points of view; We will think of Thyssen black jacket (1972), composed of five consecutive images from different angles, front or side. His iterations would be a precedent for Andy Warhol’s iterations, and his technique, very different from that of the pop author: If he automates it in sygraph, Katz will repaint the model’s image from scratch on each iteration, getting results every time. Different. The other multiple photos that arrived in Madrid are the latest Nicole 1 (2016) and Vivian (2016).

In parallel, he also developed group portraits in which he captured the meetings of poets, critics, photographers and painters close to him. Eleven of them appear in cocktail party (1965), and they are just as recognizable as French royals In his writings of the nineteenth century in a somewhat similar spirit. Seeing the stillness of this scene, he sought to incorporate movement into it Thursday night #2 (1974), a conversation between five friends who hang a large picture of Ada, or hill tour (1977), a group of characters sunbathe on the beach, among whom we appreciate, once again, his wife and son, Vincent Katz.

As for landscapes, the painter cultivated them at the beginning of his career and thirty years later, since the mid-1980s, after starring in a retrospective at the Whitney Museum. They will, of course, be large, between three and six meters, so that they can be surrounded by scenes and in them give importance to the shapes of the trees and the variations of light. Flowers have taken care of him, too, since the late 1960s: he’s given them extensive close-ups, alone or in bouquets, and used them to practice compositions and spatial manipulations without the constraints imposed by the human body.

The Thyssen Anthology ends with the help of green table (1996), a wooden table on which we will see a group of painted heads or Cutters, a practice that Katz began using in 1959, almost by accident, in order to test some 3D dimensions in his paintings. He first cut out the sketches he made on canvases, dissatisfied with the backgrounds, and then fixed them on a piece of wood; Desiring the result, he will continue to work several times directly on the same wood or other materials, such as aluminum. He first exhibited these pieces in 1962, at the Tanager Gallery in New York; Then they were called flat figurines Pictures of friends, artists and writers were represented.

The artist, the son of Russian immigrants in America, today finished presenting this exhibition in the hope that Ukraine would win the war.

Alex Katz

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

Paseo del Prado, 8

Madrid

From 11 June to 11 September 2022