Alex Katz calls his large-format landscapes, which were mainly created in Maine in the region around his studio, “environmental” paintings.

Compared to portraits, landscapes allow him to create all-over compositions that share qualities with abstract expressionism, the movement that dominated art during his studies. When the historian David Sylvester asked him whether landscapes dictated this feeling, Katz replied: “It’s art, it’s not nature. Nature is only a vehicle for art.”

Red House is an original 203.2 x 213.4 x 0.0 cm oil painting in the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which belongs to Bernard Arnault.

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 work 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.