Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of “CUT OUTS” sculpture by Alex Katz. This is the artist’s debut at the gallery and demonstrates his 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, which will populate the gallery space like figures at a party, mirror their stern materiality. Realised 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 the entire set of his Black Dress series (9 in total) and one larger, multi-figure work.
Since 1951, Katz 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, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain.
Katz is represented in over 100 public collections worldwide, and throughout his career has been the recipient of numerous awards: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting in 1972, and in 1987, the Pratt Institute’s Mary Buckley Award for Achievement and The Queens Museum of Art Award for Lifetime Achievement. Katz was inducted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, and recognised with honorary doctorates by Colby College, Maine in 1984 and Colgate University, Hamilton, New York in 2005. In 2007, he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York.
