Coco Dolle at The Opening of Alex Katz: Gathering at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

 Alex Katz waving to a cheering crowd on his Guggenheim museum opening night

Photos by Coco Dolle
Text from the Guggenheim Museum

“Gathering” Alex Katz curated by Katherine Brinson
Guggenheim Museum
Until February 20, 2023

Across eight decades of intense artistic production, Brooklyn-born Alex Katz (1927) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense. “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness,” Katz stated in 1961. “Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends of a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has explored the capacity of the medium to distill what he terms “quick things passing.”

Katz established himself as an artist in mid-century New York, at a time when the emotive abstract canvases of painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko had placed the city at the center of the avant-garde. Katz, however, rejected the introspection of Abstract Expressionism in favor of rendering the perceptual encounters with people and places that structure daily life. Working within the traditional contemporary approach to figuration that merged the experimental energy of abstract painting with an American vernacular shaped by Hollywood movies, billboard ads, and fashion magazines.

This retrospective is a gathering of sorts, not only of a body of work produced over the course of a long and still highly active career, but also of the family members, friends, and collaborators who have served as the artist’s subjects and creative community.

  Guests at the opening event. From left to right, Robin Cembalest former Artnews editor, pioneer artist Joan Jonas, Iranian artist Shirin Neshat and her assistant Giulia.
 

The crowd at the opening event of "Gathering" on Friday October 21st, 2022

"The Red Smile" (1963) portrait of Ada Katz portrait, Alex's wife and lifelong muse

Work by Alex Katz

Portraits, image from the opening event

Tree (2019) image from the opening event

Guests at the opening event

Early portrait of Ada Katz

The Black Dress (1960) at the exhibition