Ada Portfolio is a series of ten silkscreen prints by Alex Katz, all featuring his muse and wife Ada Katz, née de Moro. Alex Katz is the preeminent painter of modern life. He has defined the American visual vocabulary for over sixty years, and his work is both timeless and rooted in time.

For an exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels, Katz has taken a look into his past, revisiting works from across his oeuvre. The new paintings are cropped copies of earlier iconic portraits from 1957 to 2008, featuring his wife Ada. In works such as Ada 8, a cropped version of the 1989 work Ada in Red, the accessories and embellishments have been dropped, leaving the naked human face floating outside of time and context. By reworking portraits from his past, Katz in turn reflects the present. Through the luminous color palette, graphic sensibility, and cinematic design of each composition, the works on view underscore the artist’s resilience and originality. The present silkscreen portfolio, which can certainly be described as unique, was also created from this very series. Katz has painted his wife Ada, the subject of countless drawings and prints, hundreds of times over the years. Recognizable by her dark brown hair, large dark eyes and full lips, Ada is approachable yet remains distant, introverted and inscrutable. Viewing these works together reveals an unexpected range of emotion and complexity in Katz’s portrayal of Ada. Because of the time gap between the original portraits, the artist conceals Ada’s identity in the flat yet bold simplicity of the painting; she could be many different people.

ALEX KATZ was born in 1927 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and grew up in St. Albans, Queens, where his family moved in 1928, just before the Depression began. His first aesthetic influences came from his parents, who had met in Russia during World War I and met again in New York City. His mother Sima was an actress, a star of the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side who performed under the stage name Ella Marion. She was “very literary,” Katz says – she taught herself English with the help of a dictionary and an Edgar Allan Poe collection, whose poems she also had her four-year-old son recite – and had a biting sense of humor. In his memoirs, Katz recounts that he once told her as he was leaving in a hotel lobby, “It was awfully nice talking to you,” to which she replied, “I hope you don’t paint in clichés.” A pioneer of Pop Art, he always focused on the essentials and was an early adopter of simplified forms and high-contrast color composition. His art is diverse, but always has beauty as its central theme. The artist can now look back on more than 200 solo exhibitions as well as around 500 group exhibitions; his diverse works are part of over 100 collections worldwide. Alex Katz lives and works in New York and Maine.