Irish Museum of Modern Art
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Alex Katz, Hiroshi and Marcia, 1981, Oil on canvas, 182.8 x 243.7 cm, Tate, presented by Paul Schupf, 1983, © DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2007
Alex Katz, Ted Berrigan, 1967, oil on linen, 121.9 cm x 121.9 cm, Photo courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York, © DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2007
Alex Katz, Yvonne in Green, 1995, Oil on linen, 48 x 72 inches, Courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery, New York, © DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2007
Katz is best known as a painter of people, and the wide cross section of his portraits featured in the show demonstrate the variety which he has brought to the genre. They include dramatic variations in scale, abrupt cropping of images, and such subtle artifices as appearing to place his subjects in a luxuriant outdoor setting, which is, in reality, another Katz painting. Pride of place among the portraits goes to the poets and writers, many from the New York School, who made up the artist’s circle of friends and whose names constitute a veritable who’s who of New York cultural life.
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927 and studied at The Cooper Union in New York and at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. His work has been the subject of nearly 200 solo exhibitions internationally since he first exhibited in 1954. He became widely known internationally following a large-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986 and a print retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1988. These were followed by major exhibitions of portraits and landscapes at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 1998, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, 1999, and Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 2002, and elsewhere. In the summer of 2003, the first European exhibition devoted solely to the artist's celebrated portraits opened at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. Alex Katz's work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide.
The exhibition is curated by Juan Manuel Bonet, independent curator, consultant, art historian and former Director of the Reina Sofía National Museum of Modern Art, Madrid, who curated a major exhibition of Katz’ work at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, in 1996, and Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.
The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES
A fully-illustrated catalogue, published in association with Charta, Milan, accompanies the exhibition with an essay by Juan Manuel Bonet and an interview with the artist by Rachael Thomas, plus an anthology of poetry, selected by the artist’s son, the poet Vincent Katz.
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arrow link" hspace="0" src="/en/siteimages/arrow2.gif" align="baseline" border="0" /> Press Release
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