Alex Katz Figure in Water, 2012

Though water had been a recurring element in Katz’s paintings during his early formative years, it wasn’t until his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986 that it became a subject in its own right. In his environmental paintings, Katz works fast, adopting a wet-on-wet technique, where the entire composition must be finished before the first layer has time to dry. This has led him to develop a quick, syncopated brushwork, which encapsulates a fleeting impression of what the artist terms the ‘immediate present’. The figure wading out into the water in Figure in Water (2012) represents one of the rare occasions on which Alex Katz lets himself insert human figures into his seascapes, but the social triviality they represent does not contradict the abstraction-figuration of water, adding instead a touch of narrative and maybe even a touch of humour.