Sunrise 1 is a portrait by Alex Katz showing a young woman wearing a purple hat. Katz, who has long been interested in fashion – as in “Black Dress” – also often refers to upper-middle-class American sportswear, such as that found in Maine or the Hamptons. The light in Maine was also a revelation to him, as he writes in his memoir, “richer and darker than the light in the paintings of the Impressionists. It helped me break away from European painting and find my own look.” A few years later, Katz, artist Lois Dodd, and Katz’s then-wife Jean Cohen, an abstract painter he had met in school and married in 1950, bought a house (the yellow farmhouse that often appears in his paintings) and land in Lincolnville, Maine, a small coastal town near Camden. (They paid $1,200 for it.) The couple divorced in 1956, but Katz kept the house. Light, and especially Maine light – melting grass and leaves, hitting a lake with the blinding brightness of a mirror in the sun – was to become, one might think, the real subject of his landscapes. ALEX KATZ was born in 1927 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and grew up in St. Albans, Queens, where his family moved in 1928, just before the Depression began. His first aesthetic influences came from his parents, who had met in Russia during World War I and met again in New York City. His mother Sima was an actress, a star of the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side who performed under the stage name Ella Marion. She was “very literary,” Katz says – she taught herself English with the help of a dictionary and an Edgar Allan Poe collection, whose poems she also had her four-year-old son recite – and had a biting sense of humor. In his memoirs, Katz recounts that he once told her as he was leaving in a hotel lobby, “It was awfully nice talking to you,” to which she replied, “I hope you don’t paint in clichés.” A pioneer of Pop Art, he always focused on the essentials and was an early adopter of 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.

The graphic goes back to an exhibition with the same title “Sunrise”. Using a cut-up technique, Alex Katz combines inspirations from Manet’s paintings of women in hats in the sun, the fractured images of early Cubism and the “cheap” quality in Fassbinder’s “Beware of the Holy Whore”. These large-scale, immersive portraits by Sunrise Coigney encapsulate the fleeting nature of the gaze in everyday life. The son of Russian immigrants who were interested in art and poetry, Alex Katz first attended the Woodrow Wilson School in New York, which combined academic and artistic training. In 1946, he enrolled at the Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan, where he learned the theories and techniques of modern art. After graduating, he exhibited at the Roko Gallery, also in New York. At the end of 1950, after a phase of creative uncertainty, Katz began to concentrate increasingly on portraits. He painted his own circle of friends and above all his second wife and muse, Ada del Moro, whom he met in 1958. She became his most frequent model and is the subject of more than 1,000 works. Katz has stated that he was only interested in reproducing the appearance of the sitter, her superficiality, without becoming emotionally involved. It was at this point that he began to use the flat, monochrome backgrounds that would become one of the hallmarks of his style. The figure is depicted separately from the background in a bare space without spatial references, objects or light sources. Shortly afterwards, influenced by movie screens and billboards, Katz began to produce large-scale paintings, which marked a turning point in his career. At this point, he wanted to bring figurative painting to the large-scale canvas format characteristic of the Abstract Expressionists, which had not been done before. At the same time as enlarging the canvas, however, he also enlarged the sitter’s face, which is why he began to paint large portraits in close-up against backgrounds of the same color, with fragmented facial features and often very tight compositional framing that even drastically cropped the face. Katz continued to explore the possibilities of portraiture by producing series on a single canvas. A portrait could be double or multiple, like a kind of photographic contact sheet or stills in a movie. He stuck to his idea of not conveying the personalities of the sitters and not showing them in different roles or at different moments in their lives, but rather presenting the subject. Katz’s early repetitions preceded those of Andy Warhol, and his technique is completely different: while Warhol automated them through the use of silkscreens, Katz repainted the image with each repetition, achieving a different result each time.