Alex Katz: Gathering

The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculpture Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of absolute awareness in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of quick things passing, compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artists first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katzs artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artists work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production. Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artists practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding cutouts and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artists oeuvre. Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of Americas most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide.