Alex Katz

Alex Katz is a bee. With his brush and oily pollen, he fertilizes the flowers in our imagination. Like a bee he has conjured into existence what was not here. Like a bee he moves from bloom to bloom, petal to petal, stamen to stamen. Steadily working, fulfilling the directives of his instinct. Alex Katz is a cave painter. The cave painter of our times and, we desperately pray, of the times yet to come. For eyes yet to come. If, in forty thousand years, when perhaps flowers no longer exist but these paintings do, they will have no author. Those whose longing eyes pass over them with awe will be certain only that they were made by a fellow human. And that is all that matters.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) is the preeminent painter of modern life. Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and epic landscapes, 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 Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; el Museum Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; and the National Galerie, Berlin. 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. In 2022 Katz was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.