Reflections 2 by Alex Katz is a graphic that plays with the contrast of light and shadow and their reflections on the water surface. There have been similar works in the work cycle of Alex Katz more often. Alex Katz aims to immediately convey those immediate visual impressions from which the viewer derives an essential idea about the phenomena. He has often referred to this moment of realization as a “flash” or “explosion” before an image settles into the viewer’s field of vision. focus. He has developed a style that depicts the immediate, the intangible, the present through foreshortening and refinement; Katz liberates familiar, everyday images from the constraints of history and narrative, and from the conflicting impulses of emotion. Releasing emotions, he refines his images, freeing them from conventions and focusing on essential and direct information. Under Katz’s realism – without the sentimental, introspective or superfluous – gives this moment of insight to an ever-changing sense of contemporaneity that exists simultaneously in the image and in its subject.

Alex Katz’s landscape paintings like Reflections 2 exemplify his lifelong quest to capture the present in color. Determined by the temporal qualities of light, the times of day, and the changing of the seasons, his paintings provoke reflection on the convergence of perception and consciousness, on the relationship between art and nature, and on the notion of the present moment. Reflection 2 (2021) depicts a scene reflected in the lower part of the canvas, using a formal device that departs from his traditional “environmental landscapes” and reinvents the genre.

In the five and a half decades since his first exhibition in 1954, Alex Katz has produced a highly recognized body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. He established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life and was influenced by films, billboards, music, poetry, and his close circle of friends and family. His portraits and landscapes are characterized by their flat color and flowing lines, reinventing both genres in the context of abstract painting and contemporary image-making.

Works by Alex Katz are in international public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., to name a few.

Alex Katz is particularly famous for his figurative paintings: The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in New York in 1927. A pioneer of Pop Art, he always focused on the essentials and early on explored 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.