Alex Katz Ada with Hat, 2012

Ada with Hat (2012) is an exemplary portrait painting by celebrated American artist Alex Katz. The work depicts Ada, Katz’s wife, who has acted as a model for the artist since the late 1950s. She wears a large, wide-brimmed white hat, which fills the pictorial plane and characterises the two-tone blue background as a bisected landscape of sky and sea. While retaining the sense of flatness characteristic of the artist’s approach to portraiture, the work pays particular attention to light and shadow – evident on the nose and chin of the subject – evoking the impression of natural light, as if the image was captured en plein air. Although the brightly coloured, geometric shapes that comprise the figure relate to abstraction, they are firmly situated in the realm of the figurative, their enlarged forms evoking the cinematic close-up that has inspired Katz since the early 1960s.

A major retrospective of the artist’s work, Gathering, is currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York until 20 February 2023.