20 October – 19 November 2011

American artist, Alex Katz, presented a new sequence of canvases, studies in oil, cartoons and drawings, all pertaining to dance in his exhibition, Face the Music, at our Paris Marais gallery.

One of the undisputed key figures of American pop art, since the early 1950s - inspired by American billboards, the principle of seriality, and human representations, free of any kind of psychology - he was already preparing the way for pop art. Although Alex Katz belongs to the pop generation of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it was not until the 1970s that his paintings were exhibited internationally.

Since the 1980s, Katz has been a protagonist of Cool Painting, and one of the most influential painters worldwide. He came to be a regular father figure for an entire generation of young contemporary painters. Birth of the Cool was the title of an exhibition held in Zurich and Hamburg in 1997; it examined the way the musical coolness of American post-War jazz performed by musicians such as Stan Getz or Miles Davis became a new category in American painting. Face the Music also dealt with the manifestation of music (and dance) in the media of painting and drawing.