First colour in the figures lovingly, then strip them back Exhibition review by Stefan Trinks
To call Alex Katz a Pop artist would do him an injustice, just as one would not reduce the rich nuances of a fine vintage Riesling to a single flavour note. Long before the 1990s, which saw the dissolution of clearly definable individual styles, Katz was already a one-man band, uniting within himself a whole orchestra of idiosyncratic, sensual approaches to art and influencing a legion of emerging artists – the painting of Julian Opie, for instance, is scarcely conceivable without him. Now the universally talented artist, born in 1927 and soon to be ninety-nine years old, has an exhibition at Tübingen’s Kunsthalle, which, following the magnificent Beuys show held there, presents him as an equally open-minded contemporary of the German artist, working in many respects in similar ways.
Similar in the sense of always working against the grain: in 1959, Katz held his first successful exhibition (one shown five years earlier, also in New York, had ended in disaster) with ‘New Images of Men’. The opening work in Tübingen stems from this exhibition: the dancer ‘Paul Taylor’ in a white tracksuit, whom the dance-loving Katz – as is the case in his other portraits of close acquaintances or friends – first approaches very intimately in a sort of close-up, refining facial features only to subsequently reduce them to the bare minimum and, in a sense, ‘emptying’ the subject.
What is already fascinating in the 1959 painting and runs through Katz’s oeuvre to this day: Paul Taylor is captured in the very blink of an eye before the dance begins; his right leg appears raised by mere millimetres. Yet despite the moment being frozen, he radiates unbridled energy and an almost aristocratic lightness of foot, comparable to the elegant contrapposti of English royal portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds.
