For more than half a century Katz painted these landscapes in Maine with a virtuosity and coupled with consistent elegance. Sunset – Sunrise. The perpetual sequence of sunrise and sunset has been worked by many artists since time immemorial. Alex Katz’s Sunrise features landscapes from the edge of his Maine home. Katz is in the midst of a storm. The sun breaks orange against dark spruce trees; day falls from a thicket of trees; and a night sky emerges from nothing but unruly movements of black and gray. In these new works, Katz manifests his vision to those in the darkness, dealing with mysteries he can almost conjure in paint. The life of a painting can be truly mysterious, especially for the painter. These paintings exist metaphorically where life borders on death, and may have something sinister to tell us. Alex Katz has painted landscapes throughout his career, often depicting views from his home in Maine, including Sunrise. Katz captures what he calls “the present” or a “flash” just before the painting comes into focus. The moment is the early morning sun glowing behind a birch forest, a sublime scene as the sun rises from the horizon, scattering light in colors across the sky. The themes of Katz’s landscapes are form, surface, space, and light as they appear to him in nature. Sunrise is a woodcut and silkscreen with 6 colors, the first layer being a three-color blend for the sky, followed by three more layers of yellow, orange, and a dense black. A hand-cut oak wood panel follows with a transparent black color and is overlaid by a final silkscreen run, also in a very transparent flat black. This technique allows the rich wood grain to be seen in the depths of the birch trees that are the focus of the painting. Woodblock prints are quite sought after by collectors because unlike screen printing, the creation of the artwork and the printing process itself is much more handcrafted and done by people, i.e. the artist, than, for example, screen printing. Despite his advanced age, Alex Katz still creates the printing plates himself for etchings and woodblock prints. 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. 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 and still paints and prints editions which are for sale. Collectors all around the world buy his art both as an investment and for aestethical reasons. His work contains numerous historical references, from Japanese block printing, Matisse and Monet to Jackson Pollock, Degas and, of course, Pop Art. Especially in his landscape paintings, the influence of Japanese art is clearly visible.

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 dealt 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.

His work contains numerous historical references, from Japanese woodblock, Matisse and Monet to Jackson Pollock, Degas and of course Pop Art. Especially Katz` landscapes display the huge influence of Japanese art.