Ada
March 31 — May 28, 2022
Brussels
Alex Katz is the preeminent painter of modern life. For over sixty years, he has defined the American visual vocabulary, and like all great painters, his work is both beyond and rooted in time. For some, their art remains alive and for others it is unreachably stuck in the past. For Katz, his work is timeless, and the theme is time itself.
For his third exhibition at Gladstone, Katz has peered into his past to revisit works from throughout his oeuvre. These new paintings re-present cropped copies of earlier iconic portraits from 1957 to 2008 of the artist’s wife Ada. In works such as Ada 8, which is a cropped version of the 1989 work Ada in Red, the accessories and adornments have fallen away, leaving the stark visage of the human face, floating outside of time and context. By reworking portraits from his past, Katz has in turn mirrored the present moment. Employing a bright palette, graphic sensibility, and cinematic framing of each composition, the works on view highlight the artist’s resilience and originality.
Installation
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About
Photo by Vivien Bittencourt
Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) is the preeminent painter of modern life. Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and striking landscape depictions, Katz has inspired generations of painters.
Katz's work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo presentations over the course of his expansive career. His work is in the permanent collections of over one hundred museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine; the Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Albertina Museum, Vienna; el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Katz lives and works in New York. He was the 2019 Honoree at TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art and had a solo survey exhibition at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai in 2020. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; and the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenar; as well as a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York.
