Alex Katz
American,
b. 1927
Alex Katz is a contemporary American artist renowned for his large-format paintings of landscapes, flowers, and portraits of his wife Ada. Katz’s flattened forms and simplification of detail are trademarks of his works. He attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. It was here that the artist first began to make plein-air paintings of the Maine landscape. During the mid-1950s, Katz fell into the small circle of artists known as the 10th Street Scene, which included Lois Dodd, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, among others. Over the following decades, he developed his hallmark style of painting while also experimenting with collage, printmaking, and painted aluminum cutouts.