Alex Katz Purple Splits Alex Katz Purple Splits

Alex Katz Purple Splits

6 June—26 July 2023
Paris Marais

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Following Alex Katz’s career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Purple Splits is an exhibition of new paintings by the celebrated American artist, featuring his ongoing series of fragmented portraits. 
 
All produced within the past year, these works demonstrate Katz’s enduring ability to innovate, and his curiosity as he continues to expand the boundaries of his practice seven decades into his career.

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There has always been something cinematic about Alex Katz’s work. His crops and close-ups borrow from the dynamics of montage to emulate dramatic camera framings. In the late 1980s, Katz’s work also took on the scale of the cinema screen as he began creating monumental landscapes he describes as ‘environmental’. 
 
Katz’s Splits represent a further exploration of the moving image, reprising repetition – a formal device he used in his early career – and fusing it with ever-closer details of his sitters on a cinematic scale.
Alex Katz Purple Split 7, 2023 Oil on linen 152.4 x 213.4 cm (60 x 84 in)
Alex Katz
Purple Split 7, 2023
Oil on linen
152.4 x 213.4 cm (60 x 84 in)
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I loved movies. I loved the way the wide-angle screen was used, the way the rectangle was broken up. — Alex Katz
Set against a ground of deep purple, which contrasts with his model’s pale skin and brings out her dark features...
Set against a ground of deep purple, which contrasts with his model’s pale skin and brings out her dark features...
Set against a ground of deep purple, which contrasts with his model’s pale skin and brings out her dark features and red lips, the new portraits capture a sense of motion. The face of Ariel, his sitter, is repeated two or three times in each painting, always with a subtle variation in her expression.
 
Alex Katz
Purple Split 1, 2022
Oil on linen
121.9 x 121.9 cm (48 x 48 in)
 
Alex Katz
Purple Split 1, 2022
Charcoal and red chalk on kraft paper
121.9 x 121.9 cm (48 x 48 in)
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The tripartite compositions bring to mind early studies of movement, as well as iconic film sequences such as the mirror...
The tripartite compositions bring to mind early studies of movement, as well as iconic film sequences such as the mirror...

The tripartite compositions bring to mind early studies of movement, as well as iconic film sequences such as the mirror maze shooting in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). As a visual device, the split screen also resonates with today’s digital framework, demonstrating Katz’s continued awareness of how society looks at images.

Alex Katz
Purple Split 10, 2023
Oil on linen
182.9 x 304.8 cm (72 x 120 in)

Alex Katz
Purple Split 10, 2023
Charcoal and red chalk on kraft paper
182.9 x 304.8 cm (72 x 120 in)
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People see my paintings with eyes trained by seeing movies and photographs in magazines. I try to use the way these things alter the way people see as a key to the way I construct my paintings. — Alex Katz
With an eyebrow following on from the corner of an eye or two noses and mouths facing away from each...
With an eyebrow following on from the corner of an eye or two noses and mouths facing away from each other, the two-way splits recall the visual strategies of Cubism and, in particular, the Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) by Picasso. Katz wrote about his admiration for the painting in his 2012 autobiography Invented Symbols. His own assemblage of features in the new Splits is more drastic than his previous, blending, much like Picasso, different perspectives and fragments of the same face into one impossible and yet captivating image.
  
Alex Katz
Purple Split 6, 2022
Oil on linen
152.4 x 152.4 cm (60 x 60 in)
Katz sketches out his portraits, most often over a single, hour-long sitting, before scaling up the image onto large-scale cartoons...
Katz sketches out his portraits, most often over a single, hour-long sitting, before scaling up the image onto large-scale cartoons...

Katz sketches out his portraits, most often over a single, hour-long sitting, before scaling up the image onto large-scale cartoons whose outlines he transfers through a pouncing technique – the same method employed by Renaissance painters for mapping out frescoes. These drawings provide us with an insight into the artist’s practice, revealing the traditional process that underpins Katz’s sleek and ‘dazzling’ paintings, as they are often described.

Alex Katz
Purple Split 7, 2022
Charcoal and red chalk on kraft paper
152.4 x 213.4 cm (60 x 84 in)

Raphael
cartoon for the painting An Allegory or Vision of a Knight, c.1504
Pen and brown ink on paper, pricked for transfer
18.2 x 21.4 cm (7.17 x 8.43 in)
British Museum, London
Katz has always defined himself as a painter of ‘the immediate present’. His portraits, like his landscapes, capture a moment,...
Katz has always defined himself as a painter of ‘the immediate present’. His portraits, like his landscapes, capture a moment,...
Katz has always defined himself as a painter of ‘the immediate present’. His portraits, like his landscapes, capture a moment, not as an exact likeness, but in terms of its single, irreproducible essence. At the same time, the sketches form a further doubling of the image and the sitter herself.  They demonstrate the primacy of style and technique in Katz’s work, over narrative and content.
 
Alex Katz
Purple Split 8, 2022
Oil on linen
152.4 x 152.4 cm (60 x 60 in)
 
Alex Katz
Purple Split 8, 2022
Charcoal and red chalk on kraft paper
182.9 x 182.9 cm (72 x 72 in)
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For any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it. — Charles Baudelaire
Katz has always defined himself as a painter of ‘the immediate present’. His portraits, like his landscapes, capture a moment,...

Katz has always defined himself as a painter of ‘the immediate present’. His portraits, like his landscapes, capture a moment, not as an exact likeness, but in terms of its single, irreproducible essence. As Ewa Lajer-Burcharth argues in her essay for the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue: ‘multiplication [suggests] a desire to evacuate all psychic content from the portrait’. Utilising montage as a visual strategy, it is the essence of his sitter Ariel that Katz distils through the many facets of her appearance.

Alex Katz
Purple Split 2, 2022
Oil on linen
182.9 x 121.9 cm (72 x 48 in)
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Alex Katz Purple Split 15, 2022 Oil on linen 91.4 x 121.9 cm (36 x 48 in)

Alex Katz

Purple Split 15, 2022

Oil on linen

91.4 x 121.9 cm (36 x 48 in)
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Alex Katz Purple Split 13, 2022 Oil on linen 121.9 x 152.4 cm (48 x 60 in)

Alex Katz

Purple Split 13, 2022

Oil on linen

121.9 x 152.4 cm (48 x 60 in)
Enquire
Learn more about the artist
Learn more about the artist
Alex Katz captures the immediate moment with 'Purple Splits' Interview on the occasion of his Paris exhibition
Featured in Whitewall
30 June 2023

Alex Katz captures the immediate moment with 'Purple Splits'

Interview on the occasion of his Paris exhibition
His works are 'forming an elusive, character-driven picture show of power, desire, and fragility in our contemporary ethos.'
Alex Katz's exhibition 'Purple Splits' in Paris 'A must-see' according to French cult magazine Inrocks
Featured in Inrocks | Le photoblog de Renaud Monfourny
23 June 2023

Alex Katz's exhibition 'Purple Splits' in Paris

'A must-see' according to French cult magazine Inrocks
'Thoughtful, conceptual images that he finalizes at the moment of the painter's gesture. A must-see!'
Alex Katz: Purple Splits Review of his show in Paris by Laurent Boudier
Featured in Télérama
13 June 2023

Alex Katz: Purple Splits

Review of his show in Paris by Laurent Boudier
'Katz's work superbly demonstrates a delightful ecumenism.'
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