Alex Katz acquisition at MoMA

Alex Katz's painting, Black Roses 11 (2025), has been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, building upon the prestigious institution's extensive collection of the artist’s work and histories of exhibiting it, most recently in 2024 in the solo exhibition Alex Katz: Seasons.

This work belongs to a series of new paintings by Katz, others of which were the subject of a solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg earlier this year. With these large-scale canvases, the American artist returns to the depiction of flowers, a motif that has featured in his work throughout his career. Subtle and sparing, this most recent group of works testifies to his sustained exploration of abstraction: Katz distils the flowers into rhythmically arranged areas of opaque fields of paint. By eliminating the roses of any form of visual adornment and flattening their complexity in favour of rhythm and space, Katz turns the motif into something almost sculptural. The artist is known for his striking use of colour, and here, he emphasises the basic shapes of petals and buds by restricting his palette to black or orange against white backgrounds, creating dynamic compositions that appear as snapshots of an ongoing movement.