Alex Katz: Out of Sight Exhibition review
By Tom McGlynn
As Out of Sight makes plain, drawing has always been integral to Alex Katz’s investigations into quotidian subjects; those that project large across his grand ambition to synthesize the conventional with the uncanny. The exhibition’s curator, Kiko Aebi, notes in the catalogue that Katz’s unique style is a product of the artist, “working in a deliberately anachronistic manner, sourcing inspiration and techniques—especially in the case of his drawings—from earlier art historical moments in order to push his work in new directions.” The artist’s lifelong studio conversations with an expansive range of aesthetic progenitors have ranged from Piero della Francesca to Paolo Veronese to Pierre Matisse and, in some of the drawings on display, a passing affinity with Manet and Degas can be detected. Such a rich artistic lineage is made much more apparent in this collection of early works and preparatory sketches than in his leaner and large-scale, finished paintings.
The show opens with works from his earliest period as a student and journeyman artist, including a remarkable collection of loosely captured landscapes of Maine dating from his crucial residency at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 1949–50. Done with a brush in black ink, these pieces, such as House in Woods 1 (1950), reveal the artist incorporating the expressionist mark with a definitive topographic sensibility and come as close as any of his works to Matisse’s own structured jouissance. Considering the dominant Abstract Expressionist painterly mode in New York at the time, these can be seen as Katz’s response to and rejection of the purely abstract gesture for a situated encounter with raw presence. This form of mediated immediacy has strongly characterized the artist’s theory and practice since.
