Alex Katz

GBE presents the artist's fourth exhibition with the gallery in five years.

This exhibition is exclusively devoted to his series of landscapes, all painted between 2013 and 2015 in Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The economy of the Katz brushstroke is so distinct that it is instantly, and intimately, linked with the artist’s hand. It is through these works that Katz shares with us not only a musically orchestrated display of light-licked forests, trembling inky brooks at dusk, and the flickering polluted light through a Soho window, but also an interior space, one of slow and powerful contemplation.

Environmental in scale, unapologetic and precise, Katz's paintings prompt an exhilaration, drawn from both natural observation, and natural majesty. They evoke an entire world of expanding and swimming light, space and time, producing a body of work as animated and charged with life as any other. Speaking of the works, Katz has said “they are mostly light...you look at one and you float inside of it”.

In profound and vital ways, these works engage with time, both the marking of it and its passing. The urgency and passion with which these paintings are rendered signal a man not looking back or forward, but floating in that elusive present.

Alex Katz, currently in his ninth decade, has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo presentations over the course of his encompassing career, which has extended over more than half a century. In addition to his current show at Gavin Brown's enterprise, his work will appear in two significant solo exhibitions in 2015, including a retrospective of his landscapes at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, opening in June (traveling to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain), and an exhibition devoted to his works from the 1950's at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, ME, opening in July (traveling to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH).

Katz's work is included 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; the Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; el Museum Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

A full color catalogue accompanies the exhibition.