The square portrait Straw Hat 2 shows an Asian-looking woman. The series was created in Seoul, Korea, for the exhibition Flowers at Thaddaeus Ropac. From the numerous oil paintings of Straw Hats a motive was selected for tis particular graphic edition. Straw Hat 2 is an exemplary work by Alex Katz you can say it is the essence of beauty. This print features Katz’s clean lines and minimal approach to portraiture, and the monochromatic background that is typical of his compositions. These portraits have no clear narrative – it is not important for the viewer to know the person or story behind the artwork.

What Katz is trying to emphasize is actually the beauty of the subjects. The use of soft colors and emphasis on fashionable details in his paintings transform the coldness of sharp lines, lack of detail, and flatness into a work of art that the viewer can enjoy. Alex Katz Straw Hat 2 is a pigment print similar to screen printing.

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 visual 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 movies, 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 has challenged every mainstream American movement over the years, yet borrowed something from it: 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.