The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Alex Katz: Gathering, una career retrospective set up in the city where Katz lived and worked all his life and set up with the close collaboration of the artist. On display from 21 October 2022 to 20 February 2023, the exhibition occupies the museum's Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda and adjacent Tower Gallery. Comprising paintings, oil sketches, collages, prints and independent “cut-out” works, the exhibition opens with intimate sketches of New York subway passengers made by the artist during his student days in the 40s and culminates in landscapes entrancing and engaging films that have dominated his production in recent years. Over the course of eighty years of intense creative production, Alex Katz (born 1927, Brooklyn, New York he attempted to capture the visual experience in the present tense. Writing in 1961, Katz noted that “Eternity exists in the minutes of absolute awareness. Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking an exchange of glances between friends or a ray of light filtered through trees, the goal is to create a record of “things that pass quickly,” compressing the flow of everyday life into a vivid burst of perception optics.
Emerging as artist in the mid-XNUMXth century, Katz he forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy and distillation of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen.
New York and the Maine Coast: Its Pictorial Environment
He turned to his surroundings, in central New York and coastal Maine, as his primary subject throughout his career, involving the traditional painterly subjects of portraiture, genre scenes of everyday life, and landscape. The exhibition's title, Gathering, refers to the study of the visible world evoked in the 1951 poem “Health” by Katz's admired friend, James Schuyler. Likewise, it invokes the idea of a lifetime of work assembled within the structure of a retrospective and the gathering of Katz's subjects within the unique, open space of the rotunda. Whether representing individuals or social groups, Katz's portraits document an evolving community of poets, artists, dancers, musicians, and critics who have animated the downtown avant-garde since mid-century, including Frank O'Hara, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Taylor, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Joe Brainard, Kynaston McShine, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg, Mariko Mori, Bill T. Jones, and Joan Jonas. Numerous portrait subjects recur throughout the loosely chronological installation, most notably Ada Katz, the accomplished Fulbright research biologist and scholar whom the artist married in 1958 and whom she has depicted more than a thousand times since then. Described by the poet Frank O'Hara as "a presence and at the same time a pictorial conception of style", Ada functions as the iconographic heart of Katz's work, a physiognomy and a subjectivity studied along the arc of both the individual life of the subject and the creative development of the artist.
The exhibition is accompanied by an academic catalogue
A volume with eleven essays newly commissioned by David Breslin, Katherine Brinson, Jennifer Y. Chuong, David Max Horowitz, Arthur Jafa, Katie Kitamura, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Kevin Lotery, Prudence Peiffer, and Levi Prombaum. In addition to an extensive section of plates and a comprehensive account of exhibitions and publications, the book contains a Sourcebook of 36 reviews, texts and poems by an eminent group of writers who responded to Katz's work at different points in his career, consistently in an illuminating document of the artist's rich and changing critical reception from the XNUMXs to the present. A series of digital productions will complement the retrospective, including an intimate, newly captured video portrait of the artist at work and an audio guide highlighting observations from Guggenheim curators and the most famous sitters appearing in Katz's paintings, including the choreographer Bill T. Jones, poet Vincent Katz, composer Meredith Monk and poet Anne Waldman. “[Katz is] a really honest person,” Monk shares for the audio guide. “And I think there's an honesty to his art. And I think his work has a lot of love in it, but it doesn't have to be explicit. Love is implied, because he chooses what he loves to paint. [Laughs] You know, that's the key. His love lies in the choice of topic, but all he has to do is let it be what it is. And then love comes." The guide also presents the Guggenheim's collaboration with the West Channel music house, featuring original compositions inspired by Katz's paintings of Rena Anakwe, Peter Bayne, Oli Chang, Elori Saxl, Michael Sempert, and Hoshiko Yamane. Visitors can enjoy a 40-minute version of these pieces as they move through the show. Additionally, Works & Process will present the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Guggenheim on October 25 and 26 for three special performances of Polaris, a 1976 collaboration choreographed by Paul Taylor and set and costume design by Alex Katz. Selected for the museum rotunda by Michael Novak, artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, these Polaris performances will offer audiences a unique and unprecedented opportunity to view Taylor and Katz's sculptural collaboration, normally performed on a proscenium stage, all round. A public program exploring three decades of their collaboration will take place on October 27 at the Library for the Performing Arts in New York, hosted by Works & Process and the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Alex Katz: Gathering is organized by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art, with Terra Warren, Curatorial Assistant, and with additional support from Andrea Zambrano, Curatorial Assistant.
