Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and attended Woodrow Wilson High School for its unique program that allowed him to devote his mornings to academics and his afternoons to the arts. Later, in 1946, Katz entered The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a grant that he would renew the following summer. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”
Katz began working in collage in the early 1950s but moved towards greater realism in his paintings at the end of the decade. Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture and embraced monochrome backgrounds, which would become a defining characteristic of his style, anticipating Pop Art. In 1959, Katz made his first cutout, which would grow into a series of flat “sculptures;” freestanding or relief portraits that exist in actual space. In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings, which he characterizes as “environmental.” In 1986, Katz began painting a series of night pictures—a sharp departure from the sunlit landscapes he had previously painted, forcing him to explore a new type of light. Variations on the theme of light falling through branches appear in Katz’s work throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also began painting flowers in profusion, covering canvases in blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s. Katz’s work continues to grow and evolve today.
Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951 and works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. In 1968, Katz moved to an artists’ cooperative building in SoHo, where he has lived and worked ever since.