October 30 — December 20, 2025
New York: 21st Street
The perennial and unstoppable artist Alex Katz brings his most reductive, most sublime, most aggressive work yet. 10 epically scaled paintings that demonstrate the artist’s superhuman longevity and ambition. The first work seen in this group was included in The Bitch, a two-artist pairing at O’Flaherty’s last year in December. Katz and Matthew Barney made an unprecedented and perfectly enmeshed coupling, with Barney’s dramatic and forensic study of Katz at 97 traversing this enormous orange landscape. All made in 2024 and drawing inspiration and a starting point from Matisse’s The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room), all the paintings, painted in a single bright orange, exist as stand ins for that famous after image on the back of the closed eye. They are simple in the extreme, they beg the question: what are these? Drawings? Prints? Huge studies? For Katz the questions are unimportant as he once again dances the tightrope—these Paintings are uncompromising and completely themselves.
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.
