October 30 — December 20, 2025
Opening Reception: October 30, 6–8pm
New York: 21st Street
Gladstone Gallery will present 11 new paintings by Alex Katz inspired by Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911). Each work is environmental in scale, using only a single orange on a white ground, and depicts the road in Maine where he has lived and worked every summer for almost 70 years. The view down this road is now so familiar to Katz that it has become embedded in his subconscious. He has rendered this vista numerous times over the decades, yet now, in this exhibition, the paintings seem to be formed from the unconscious memory rather than the eye. The image dematerializes, reduced to its elemental form. The viewer, standing before the orange void, falls into the space and into the years. Also accompanying the exhibition is a DRAWING RESTRAINT by Matthew Barney, which explores the then 96-year-old Katz at work on one of these enormous canvases.
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.
