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Alex Katz Tracy, 2001
A pre-eminent painter of modern life, Alex Katz draws inspiration from films, billboard advertising, music, poetry and his close circle of friends and family. Primarily working from life, he produces images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed strokes and planes of flat colour. His great admiration for Henri Matisse’s sense of colour, composition and economy of means is evident in Katz’s work, as is his interest in the American vernacular tradition. The artist’s minimal aesthetic and the pristine flatness of his painted surfaces anticipated Pop art in many ways, although Katz defines his work independently of any particular movement. Instead, he considers himself a painter of the ‘immediate present’, using techniques borrowed from the imagery of television and cinema to arresting effect.
In Tracy (2001), the artist combines two strands of his practice: portraiture and landscape painting. His subjects are most often shown against monochrome backgrounds that provide no hint of time or space, but here the female figure is located within an abstracted seascape. Katz has been painting beach scenes for over 40 years and, for him, the shore is a place where the austere horizontality of sea meeting sky and the luminosity of light on water dignify human presence. Both figure and background are executed with a remarkable economy of line and detail, with the sea indicated by a trio of rippling waves and three sailboat masts seen head-on.
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