Alex Katz has donated two paintings to the Museum Brandhorst. An early work from 1958, showing the painter and sculptor George Ortman, and a recent, very personal double portrait of his wife Ada and his son Vincent. To mark this generous donation, the Museum Brandhorst is presenting the exhibition "Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes", which, in addition to the two new acquisitions, also presents the artist's rich holdings in the Brandhorst Collection. Following the major monographic exhibition "Alex Katz" in 2018/19, the current show once again brings together major works from all creative phases. Alex Katz, who is celebrating his 97th birthday this year, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary painting. During his long career, which now spans more than 70 years, he has dedicated himself to depicting the here and now, which is why he described his art as "painting in the present tense".
Portraits
In his portraits, Katz depicts family members, acquaintances and artist friends - whether individually or in groups - with an almost simple monumentality. His flair for painterly surfaces stands in an exciting relationship to the formal language of film, fashion and advertising. Not least for this reason, Alex Katz is also celebrated as a forerunner of Pop Art. One of Katz's major works is "The Black Dress" (1960), in which he depicts his wife Ada six times, each time in an elegant black cocktail dress. The repetition of one and the same figure is reminiscent of a filmstrip, comparable to the serial character of Andy Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, created a few years later. Early on, Katz found important comrades-in-arms and aesthetic inspiration in the circles of contemporary poets, musicians and dancers. Museum Brandhorst houses two iconic paintings by choreographer Paul Taylor (1930-2018) and his dance company. Taylor stands before us in this 1959 portrait with challenging calm. His tense strength suggests that he could jump out of the picture at any moment and start dancing without warning.
"Shortly before we met, I saw Paul dance for the first time," says Alex Katz in retrospect, "at the time his choreography was the most surprising thing I had ever seen as an artist. Paul's dance style was a radical break from the previous generation: no expression, no content, no form, as he used to say, of superior technique and intelligence."
![Alex Katz, Moonlight, 1997, oil on canvas, 182.70 x 244.00 cm, Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection, Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection © Alex Katz. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [2024], Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich](https://simskultur.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2008-1817_UAB-217.jpg)
Alex Katz, Moonlight, 1997, oil on canvas, 182.70 x 244.00 cm, Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection, Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection © Alex Katz. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [2024], Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
Katz celebrated his first successes in the New York art scene at the height of Abstract Expressionism. However, he always remained committed to figurative painting. It was only late, in the mid-1980s, that he approached gestural abstraction in his landscapes and cityscapes. The branches, twigs and leaves in his paintings are reminiscent of the spontaneous gestures and "drip paintings" of Jackson Pollock. Each individual brushstroke can be read figuratively and at the same time appears as an autonomous visual sign. In some of these paintings, the light itself - whether direct, reflected or diffuse - becomes the defining theme. Reflections in water and depictions in fog or at dusk often serve as a means of capturing the moods of different times of day. "These are all very fleeting things, quickly over," says Alex Katz. "I have captured twilight in landscapes that can only be seen for a quarter of an hour. That fascinates me because it's real high-speed perception."
March 22, 2024 until February 16, 2025
www.museum-brandhorst.de
![Installation view "Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes" © Alex Katz. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [2024], Photo: Nicole Wilhelms, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Museum Brandhorst, Munich](https://simskultur.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-1105-29-683x1024.jpg)
Installation view "Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes" © Alex Katz. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [2024], Photo: Nicole Wilhelms, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Museum Brandhorst, Munich