NYAB Event - Alex Katz Exhibition

Alex Katz Exhibition

Gavin Brown's Enterprise

This event has ended.

Gavin Brown’s enterprise presents ALEX KATZ.

Marking the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery, ALEX KATZ features a rare yet integral series of Katz’s works—his cutouts.
Existing as painted portraits and freestanding relief sculptures simultaneously, these pieces represent a departure for the artist, whose famously flattened style of portraiture generally manifests on canvas. With these sculptures, Katz foregrounds this signature style literally, as the background that would typically accompany each portrait is entirely excised.

Katz created his first cutout quite by accident in 1959 when, unhappy with the composition of a portrait he was working on at the time, he cut out the painting’s central figure to see how it might look affixed to another canvas. By removing the figure from a predetermined context, allowing it to exist in space as a discrete three-dimensional object, Katz recognized that his portraits could be viewed experientially for the first time. Excited by the possibilities this liberating gesture afforded, Katz continued to create cutouts through the 1960s, eventually shifting from wooden bases to aluminum ones.

The fifteen new works featured in this exhibition are the first significant group of cutouts to be made in over a decade. They feature an assortment of figures, depicted either singularly or as part of a couple. The vocabulary of film—the extreme close ups, dramatic perspectives, and framing—has had a particular impact on Katz, who has redeployed some of these tactics in his sculptures. By omitting, enlarging, repeating, and erasing, Katz reduces painterly language to the extreme, and reproduces the immediacy and intimacy of film in so doing.
Katz has said that sculpture “should be about light and motion,” and in this group of works he accomplishes exactly that. The works achieve a weightless elegance that is all their own, dissolving form and expanding the picture plane to encompass the space surrounding each subject.

Alex Katz has been the subject of numerous major retrospectives and solo presentations over the course of his encompassing career, which has extended over more than half a century. In addition to his current show at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, his work will appear in several solo exhibitions in 2014, including 356 S. Mission Rd in Los Angeles, the Tate Modern in London, and the Albertina Museum in Vienna. His work is included in the permanent collections of over one hundred important museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Tate St. Ives, Cornwall; and Turner Contemporary, Kent.