SUBJECT TO REVERSAL by Alex Katz

Description:

Alex Katz200868Richard Gray GalleryDiana Tuite

18

About exhibition:

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by iconic American modernist Alex Katz. Alex Katz: Subject to Reversal will run from June 19th August 2nd.

In Subject to Reversal, Katz continues to push the boundaries of his signature style: richly colored, smooth portraiture. Many of the artists most familiar sitters are present, including his wife Ada and son Vincent, but instead of their characteristically emotionless faces, Katz wryly gives us the backs of their heads. For the viewer, these portraits-in-reverse project both a heightened sense of remoteness and cool, and, at the same time, they bespeak the intimacy between artist and model. The viewer becomes the voyeur.

The exhibition includes 18 works that together reveal the totality of Katzs working method. These range from finely rendered charcoal drawings to intuitive, gestural oil-on-board sketches that capture color and light, to brilliant, super-life-sized canvasses.

Alex Katz (b. 1927) has been the subject of nearly 200 solo exhibitions internationally since 1954, including most recently at the Jewish Museum, New York with Alex Katz Paints Ada, an exhibition of almost 50 years of the artists portraits of his wife. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Katzs work in 1986, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art held a similar exhibition focused on the artists prints two years later. Works by Alex Katz are in public collections worldwide, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.