Alex Katz Laura X 4 / Etching / signed, numbered/ Edition 35

Year: 2019
Format: 427 x 107 cm / 168.1 x 42.1 inch
Material: Saunders Waterford High White 425 gsm paper
Method: Etching
Edition: 35
Other: signed, numbered

Alex Katz Laura X 4, Radierung, signiert, nummeriert, Auflage 35

Alex Katz Laura X 4 / Etching / signed, numbered/ Edition 35

Year: 2019
Format: 427 x 107 cm / 168.1 x 42.1 inch
Material: Saunders Waterford High White 425 gsm paper
Method: Etching
Edition: 35
Other: signed, numbered

Alex Katz Laura X 4

Year: 2019
Format: 427 x 107 cm / 168.1 x 42.1 inch
Material: Saunders Waterford High White 425 gsm paper
Method: Etching
Edition: 35
Other: signed, numbered

Laura is, along with Ada, one of the women that Alex Katz has portrayed most often. There is a whole series of works from Laura 1 to Laura 5 in black and white as well as monochrome in green and yellow.

Since 1960, the American painter has been continuously inspired by dance, influenced by his long-standing collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor (1930-2018). While working on stage sets and costumes for Taylor’s performances, Katz developed an original work in which dancers served as models to explore the immediacy of gesture and movement through the medium of painting.

In both the Laura series and the Dancer series, Katz magnifies movement through the radical cropping that characterizes his unique style, focusing on isolated parts of the body shown in arrested movement. This original format, which cuts individual parts of the body frozen in motion, is inspired by images from television and Hollywood cinema, a technique the artist uses to create the most captivating effect. Katz was inspired by the visual language of television and Hollywood films, as friend and poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) describes: For Katz, the image and his close-up of television, poster, or film offered a way to isolate and abstract each individual feature as if it were an arc, a rhombus, an ellipse, within the psychological unity that conveys the audience in a recognizable form”. The repeated use of the colour red gives these new paintings a distinct intensity and contrasts the luminosity and dynamism of the dancer’s figure, executed with rapid brushstrokes on a monochromatic background.

With regard to the series, Katz emphasized the importance of dance and movement for his work: “I am interested in the gestures that reach into the heart of the dance. Paul [Taylor] was a student of art history, which is translated in his early works. There is a long tradition of gesture, and then you move; generally a camera records something, but it has no real sense of movement. You can only convey real movement if you manipulate it, like the way Rubens brings movement into his figures. So that became one of the things that interested me.

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 dealt with 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.