Spring 1 is a graphic by the US-American artist Alex Katz. It was produced as a screen print. On July 4, 2024, 4 monumental paintings will be exhibited in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) under the title “Alex Katz – Seasons”. The artist’s Seasons series chronicles the changing of seasons, depicting the vibrant colours of spring, summer, and fall to the stark palette of winter. These works belong to a new suite of more than 100 paintings created by Katz in his New York studio since 2022. The artist draws inspiration from his immediate surroundings, whether a lone tree encountered on Houston Street on the way home from the cinema, or the lush landscape of Lincolnville, Maine, where Katz has spent his summers since 1954. “The sensation of colour is what I wanted,” he says. “It’s the sensation of seeing.”

Alex Katz: Seasons celebrates the artist’s ever-evolving approach to interpreting the natural world. He often begins with photographs, taken with an iPhone, and smaller painted sketches, which he transforms into large-scale compositions. In many instances, Katz removes the horizon; its absence, paired with the paintings’ large scale, creates an environment with no clear beginning or end. Katz frequently completes an entire painting in a single morning. Despite continuously revisiting and reworking the four seasons theme, he approaches each canvas as a new venture. Katz cheerfully describes his process as, “Hold your breath and hope for the best.”

The artwork is part of a whole series of landscape paintings that focus on the foliage of trees throughout the seasons. The prints Autumn 1-6 by Alex Katz will be published in spring 2024 alongside the equally new portfolio “White Lotus”.

Alex Katz is particularly 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 explored simplified forms and high-contrast color composition early on. 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.