Alex Katz Ada (Purple/Black) / Woodcut / signed, numbered / edition 75

Year: 2022
Format: 59,7 x 45,1 cm / 23.2 x 17.7 inch
Material: 300 gsm paper
Method: Woodcut.
Edition: 75
Other: handsigned and numbered.

Alex Katz Ada Purple and Black
Alex Katz Purple and Black Ada framed

Alex Katz Ada (Purple/Black) / Woodcut / signed, numbered / edition 75

Year: 2022
Format: 59,7 x 45,1 cm / 23.2 x 17.7 inch
Material: 300 gsm paper
Method: Woodcut.
Edition: 75
Other: handsigned and numbered.

Alex Katz  – Ada (Purple/Black)

Year: 2022
Format: 59,7 x 45,1 cm / 23.2 x 17.7 inch
Material: 300 gsm paper
Method: Woodcut.
Edition: 75
Other: handsigned and numbered.

Ada (Purple/Black) by Alex Katz. 밀짚 모자.

Ada (Purple/Black) is a set of two woodcuts by Alex Katz. As so often, his muse and wife Ada is shown. The subjects can be hung side by side or on top of each other. Alex Katz says his subjects are “fast passing things.” For seven decades, this great American painter has stylized the human figure and landscape into large, bright, clean, poster-like compositions that both mimic our viewing habits and capture a fleeting moment in time.

Alex Katz compares his giant portraits to movies: “The film is life-size, but the faces are really ten feet tall.” In the 1950s and ’60s, Katz would leave the studio after his work was done and go straight to the cinema, no matter what was playing, to “look at the pictures, to get away from the traditional imagery. You’d see a big head on the side of the screen – a big face and a lot of landscape, I hadn’t seen that in art before.” The figures in his portraits also move, doubling, advancing, receding, in multiple perspectives reminiscent of film sequences, and of the fact that “you can’t look at one thing for long, but your eye is moving all over the place in constant motion.” Katz says he wants to suggest how “energy goes beyond the edges of a person. When you cut out a photograph, it doesn’t go beyond the edge.” These images like Ada (Purple/Black) sparkle with human presence.

Over the years, Alex Katz has challenged yet taken something from every mainstream American movement: The heroic dimensions of Abstract Expressionism, the blunt flatness of Pop, the austerity of Minimalism. He drew inspiration from each movement as well as from film and fashion to develop his own leanness of means, reducing form to its essentials so that his subjects, as his friend Frank O’Hara said of Ada, “play as abstract a role as that of Helen of Troy … a presence and at the same time a painterly conceit of style.” It was the light of Maine, “richer and darker than the light in Impressionist paintings,” Katz says, “that helped me break away from European painting and find my own look.” In his paintings, he continues the Impressionist style, depicting radiant distillations of (American) leisure and pleasure, and of the joy and surprise of seeing.

Alex Katz / Pioneer of Pop Art

Alex Katz is especially famous for his figurative paintings: The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in New York in 1927. As a pioneer of Pop Art, he always concentrated on the essentials and early on he began to explore simplified forms and contrasting color compositions. His art is diverse, but always has beauty as its central theme. The artist can now look back on more than 200 solo and around 500 group exhibitions; his diverse works are part of over 100 collections worldwide. Alex Katz lives and works in New York and Maine.

Ihr Ansprechpartner
Frank Fluegel
E-Mail: info(at)frankfluegel.com
Ihr Ansprechpartner
Frank Fluegel
E-Mail: info(at)frankfluegel.com
Alex Katz Ada (Purple/Black) / Woodcut / signed, numbered / edition 75


Year: 2022
Format: 59,7 x 45,1 cm / 23.2 x 17.7 inch
Material:300 gsm paper
Method:Woodcut.
Edition:75
Other:handsigned and numbered.
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