Overview
Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents an exhibition of recent drawings by American artist Alex Katz, each featuring a single type of flower delicately drawn in charcoal on paper. Exhibited in Salzburg for the first time, the series was created in homage to Katz’s friend and fellow artist and writer Joe Brainard (1941–94); in a posthumous collaboration, Katz embellished a selection of Brainard’s journal entries written between 1971 and 1972. A celebration of their long friendship, the poetic accounts of their life in New York City were republished in 2023, under the title, ‘Flowers Journals,’ by Karma Books, New York, alongside Katz’s drawings.
Katz and Brainard were closely associated with the New York School, a group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City, and both artists often worked together on publications, book covers or artist books. The accounts in Brainard’s journal reflect this collaborative artistic environment. He recorded conversations and accounts of expeditions with his friends including Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman and Pat and Ron Padgett – as well as their shared appreciation for Katz’s art. Brainard writes: ‘We talked a lot about how “logical” Alex’s development as a painter is: a straight line to clarity. […] How Alex has remained so pure all these years is beyond me.’ A popular motif in Brainard’s own art, Katz’s close-up drawings of flowers match the serene clarity of Brainard’s prose.
Flowers have featured in Katz’s work for decades. At first, they were part of his idyllic scenes and group paintings, ‘becoming one more layer of decoration to that [countryside] view’ as Prudence Peiffer observes in the catalogue accompanying Katz’s recent retrospective at the Guggenheim New York (2022–23). In 1966, for the first time, they became the main subject of a monumental series of paintings, and since then, Katz has continuously returned to this motif in his work. ‘It started in the rain,’ the artist has stated. ‘I cut flowers and put them in a vase and started painting them. Years later, it’s the same process, but this time around, I was more interested in the flowers rather than the vase.’
In their simplicity and precision, the flowers in this series of drawings are faintly reminiscent of illustrations in historical botany books. Yet, this latent realism is melded with Katz’s sustained exploration of abstraction. Subtle and sparing, Katz shifts the scales, distilling the flower to a few rhythmically arranged areas of charcoal hatching and lines – and reducing the motif to its essence.
When framed as cinematic close-ups, Katz’s flowers convey a striking feeling of immediacy. According to the artist, the depiction of flowers is related to his portrait practice. Much like the figures in his group paintings – an arrangement of bodies within the pictorial space – his flowers are depicted as overlapping volumes, creating dynamic compositions that appear as snapshots of an ongoing movement. Whilst he is known for his striking use of colour, here, Katz emphasises the anatomical parts of the blossoms even further by restricting his palette to black and white through his chosen medium.
Early accounts of his childhood in Queens reveal that drawing was the first medium Katz started working with as an artist. He has explained: ‘I started drawing with my father. I also remember drawing all over the staircase wall, and my parents never said anything. The drawing stayed there for years.’ Drawing continued to be an important means of expression during Katz’s studies at art school, but after his return to New York City in 1950, he started to concentrate on painting, not returning to the medium until several years later. In 1970, he discovered that he ‘could draw better than [he] could in art school, which was surprising, as [he] hadn’t done any drawing since then.’ From that point on, drawing became essential to his practice, ‘playing a mediating role between the idea of a picture and the final painting,’ as art historian Zdenek Felix observes.
In this series of drawings, the flowers take on a distinctly sculptural presence, emerging voluminously against the flat background, dis-embedded from their environment. As Peiffer observes: ‘All of the features central to Katz’s signature art are worked out to their most unexpected degree in his flowers.’
