Alex Katz Blue Shadow (Snow Scene 3), 2002
More intensely than any other body of work, the artist’s images of his unpeopled surroundings materialize a volatile exchange between a perceiving gaze and the visible world; an expression of interiority catalyzed through the scrutiny of external experience. — Katherine Brinson, curator of Alex Katz: Gathering at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2022–23
Since the 1950s, Alex Katz has reimagined the conventions of landscape painting to convey his own distinctive way of seeing the world. Created in 2002, the snowy environment of Blue Shadow (Snow Scene 3) offers a white backdrop for the fluid passages of pale blue paint that carve out the topography of the landscape, punctuated by the series of vertical lines used to articulate bare trees. Employing his signature technique of cropping an image to create unexpected compositional arrangements, Katz imbues the large-scale wintery scene with a sense of dynamism: branches seem to exceed the pictorial plane, while the bases of thick, grey tree trunks gesture to the wider landscape beyond. Such characteristic cropping of his subject – a device also employed in the artist’s approach to portraiture – pushes his painterly style beyond pure figuration, as the mark-making and formal properties of the work are brought to the fore and gesture to the visual language of abstraction.
Wintery scenes have appeared in the artist’s body of work since the mid-1990s. Amplified by their refined colour palettes, they embody Katz’s preoccupation with light, epitomising what Katherine Brinson describes as his ‘expression of interiority’ through the ‘scrutiny of external experience.’
In June 2023, solo exhibitions of work by Alex Katz will open at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar and Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais.
