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ALEX KATZ
“SOUP TO NUTS”
THE SAO PAULO BIENAL PROJECT
SELECTED BY ROBERT STORR
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Initiated at the invitation of its chief curator Jacopo Crivelli, Alex Katz: Soup to Nuts started out as a project for the 34th Sao Paulo scheduled to open in September 2020. Katz was to have been a featured artist presented in the main exhibition in the Oscar Niemeyer Pavilions of the Parque Ibirapuera, with an ancillary retrospective – for Katz his first in South America – hosted by Paulo Miyada at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The original checklist numbered around 100 works in all the formats and media Katz has utilized since the beginning of his career in the early 1950s. Although it can't possibly cover the same ground in any detail, this synoptic – "haiku" – version of that more expansive and comprehensive survey spans the same seventy year trajectory and touches on his key subjects – family, friends, fellow artists, poets, dancers, landscapes, cityscapes – collectively portraying the evolution of the "good life" in a cosmopolitan United States during the years of that country's greatest prosperity. As keen an observer of fashion in the streets and lofts of Manhattan as of the flora and fauna of his second home in rural Maine, Katz is a quintessentially Baudelarian artist, a spontaneous Manet-like realist when it comes to both the social and the natural world, a complete North American "Painter of Modern Life." As such this show of [30 paintings] may fairly be regarded as a Katz feast "from soup to nuts." – Robert Storr (Brooklyn, New York, September 2020)
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"A lot of people want to paint something timeless, but I paint the immediate present."
– Alex Katz
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"Everything is moving. There’s no reality, it’s moving. Reality is subject to fashion and so you get something where there’s no past tense, there’s no future tense, there’s only now. And I want to paint the now. That’s the immediate present. And that’s what consciousness is." – Alex Katz
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"I’m working on something that painters have never done before. I’m trying to see something and make other people see what I saw. That’s it.
And the portraits go into a social thing, too, because I’m painting the society in which I live. So it has that social identification,
but it’s also pretty optical. I’m just trying to paint what I’m looking at." – Alex Katz
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Alex Katz, Dancers 2, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 5, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 10, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 11, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 12, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 14, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 15, 2019
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Alex Katz, Dancers 16, 2019
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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‘Well the idea is to paint what is in front of you. Narrative art is always behind the immediate present. The immediate present is what you see.’
Alex Katz, (b.1927, Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in New York City. Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. In a career spanning 70 years Katz is renowned for his figurative and landscape paintings, although his practice has encompassed a wide range of disciplines.
A prolific print maker, Katz has produced more than 600 editions in various mediums. Katz has frequently collaborated with poets and dancers, most notably a 50 year collaboration with Paul Taylor Dance Company which includes designing sets and costumes for some of Taylor’s most iconic works, as well as painting portraits of dancers which he continues to this day. Katz has engaged in numerous public art projects from his 1977 billboards in Times Square, to Harlem Station 1984, for a train station in Chicago, to his most recent installation of 19 large scale works on glass for the New York Subway to name a few. Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions internationally: at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Portrait Gallery, London, among others. Works by Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London. A room at Vienna’s Albertina Museum is devoted to his work. In 2022 the Guggenheim Museum in New York will present a career spanning retrospective of his work.
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"My life [in the 1940s and 50s] was basketball, dancing and painting."
– Alex Katz
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