Alex Katz: Cutouts

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of “Cut Outs” sculpture editioned by Alex Katz. “Cut Outs” demonstrates the artist’s ongoing investigation into the properties of visual perception and the brilliance of surface as represented and rendered in the human figure. Since the 1950s, this dedication to figurative realism—informed by the scale and power of Abstract Expressionism and utilizing the graphic language of advertising that anticipated Pop—has marked Katz as one of the most inventive and technically achieved artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

The hard exterior lines of the Cut Outs mirror their stern materiality. Realized in stainless or porcelain enamel coated steel, they underscore the artist’s dedication to the flat, clean aesthetic for which he is famed. The exhibition brings together four works depicting Katz’ wife Ada with one larger, multi-figure work.

Katz produced his first painted cut out in 1959. Since that time, the figures depicted in this ongoing series portray the ever-changing artistic milieu of New York’s painters, poets and critics, as well as friends and acquaintances of the artist himself.  As in much of Katz’ oeuvre, the figures exist not as characters in a narrative but rather as manifestations of his ongoing exploration into formal arrangement, interrogating the particularities of perception and optics.

Since 1951, Katz (b. 1927) has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows internationally. He has had retrospectives at institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; Tate St. Ives, UK; Turner Contemporary, UK; Albertina Museum, Vienna; and The Guggenheim, Bilbao, and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

Katz is represented in over 100 public collections worldwide, including: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Des Moines Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2007, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York.

For more information please contact info@kasmingallery.com
For press inquiries, please contact press@kasmingallery.com