Alex Katz. Dancing with reality

The New York artist Alex Katz is one of the most influential figures in contemporary American art. His reduced, poster-like images of women in hats and depictions of party scenes in vibrant colors made him world-famous in the 1970s as a chronicler of the American way of life, and today they are icons of art history. Due to his distinctive cool and reduced style, with which he portrayed everyday life and his immediate surroundings, the artist, born in New York in 1927, has often been associated with Pop Art. However, Alex Katz is more than that. He is a transcendental realist who has been translating experiences of reality into the medium of painting for 70 years. People close to him, pets, or a tree on the street are thus torn from the flow of time and find expression in his works with emotional distance. Since the 1980s, Alex Katz has focused not only on portraits but also on representations of nature and cityscapes. With a sensitive observational ability and a perception rooted in the body, he captures the magic of the moment and, not least, expresses the essence of things in an unadulterated painterly manner. Through archetypal groups of works, the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, developed in close collaboration with Alex Katz, provides a long-overdue overview of the artist's later work. In addition to works from the 1990s, the exhibition also showcases the latest groups of works. In spontaneous and expressive pieces, Alex Katz today reveals himself as less distant and more sensually direct, immersing himself in the flow of painting and exploring the boundaries of abstraction with large-format gestural works.