Overview
Alex Katz is obsessed with capturing the present. His small-scale paintings, rendered instinctively from direct observation, achieve precisely this. Following the artist’s first solo show at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul in 2022, the gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to this rarely seen body of work, which provides an unparalleled insight into Katz’s practice. Spanning the 1990s to the present, the works on view seize the artist’s raw perception of his subjects of predilection – friends, flowers, forests –, while the inclusion of his large-scale Lilies (2025) sheds light on his assiduous process of pictorial refinement. Studies offers a rare glimpse into Katz’s aesthetic vision and, indeed, his very subconscious.
Alex Katz is obsessed with capturing the present. His small-scale paintings, rendered instinctively from direct observation, achieve precisely this. Following the artist’s first solo show at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul in 2022, the gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to this rarely seen body of work, which provides an unparalleled insight into Katz’s practice. Spanning the 1990s to the present, the works on view seize the artist’s raw perception of his subjects of predilection – friends, flowers, forests –, while the inclusion of his large-scale Lilies (2025) sheds light on his assiduous process of pictorial refinement. Studies offers a rare glimpse into Katz’s aesthetic vision and, indeed, his very subconscious.
Small-scale paintings have been integral to Katz’s practice since its inception. In the late 1940s, the artist attended the famed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he first experimented with en plein air painting – an experience he likened to ‘feeling lust for the first time’. Rendered rapidly alla prima, these small-scale studies in oil allowed Katz to probe the rich nuance of the natural light in Maine, yielding a mastery of luminosity that would pervade his oeuvre. In his own words, ‘Light is the initial flash of what you see; that’s what I’m after.’ In the mid-1950s, in reaction to the hegemonic monumentality of Abstract Expressionism, Katz returned to small-scale paintings, seeking to channel his peers’ overflowing energy into a more intimate representational style. By the 1960s, Katz’s small-scale works took on a primordial role within his deceptively meticulous pictorial process: they served as preparatory sketches in which he explored the light of his compositions, before refining them in drawings, blowing them up in Renaissance-style pouncing cartoons and ultimately painting them on the immense, billboard-like paintings that earned him critical acclaim. Katz’s small-scale paintings thus constitute a key facet of his oeuvre as both a fundamental testing ground for his emblematic large-scale canvases and an autonomous body of work wherein he distils the essence of his opus: its supreme light.
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents an array of small-scale portraits in which Katz searches for ‘the interior light of character,’ as Ingrid D. Rowland has written. The artist imbues his kindred figures with a quasi-divine quality, evinced by the yellow hues that seep through the contours of the eponymous Emma, like a halo, or the stylised bust of his friend and fellow artist Nabil Nahas that harks back to Byzantine icons. His inventively cropped compositions, meanwhile, give these works a cinematic twist. This is epitomised by Nikki (2006), in which Katz focuses on the figure’s face in a ‘choker shot’, arresting her penetrating yellow-tinted gaze amid the whirling backdrop. The sitter’s prominent teeth are rendered with an expressive blurriness, akin to those of Velázquez’s Democritus (ca. 1630), which illustrates the compelling inaccuracy of sheer perception. Katz’s fluid, fibrous treatment of paint lends the studies an expressionistic quality reminiscent of his early masterpieces such as Ada on Blue (1959; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) or The Black Dress (1960; Museum Brandhorst, Munich). In Nine Women 2 (2009), the entrancing formal delicacy of the subject’s shoes encapsulates the fragile beauty of Katz’s small-scale paintings.
An ensemble of landscapes, painted intuitively in situ, immerse the viewer in idiosyncratic vignettes, ranging from a quasi-abstract close-up of windswept blades of grass to a worm’s eye view of luscious foliage pierced by slivers of sky. Katz’s wet-on-wet technique imparts a tangible immediacy to these works, whose salient striated strokes seem to have barely had the time to dry. Staccato-like tree branches recur across his forested compositions, brimming with a vitality that exceeds the confines of the picture plane. For Katz, ‘Each image reads like a ripe, forceful slice of light that lives and dies comfortably within the span of the frame but still must be consumed promptly if it is to be caught.’ These studies herald the artist’s epic ‘environmental’ paintings, which were recently showcased in Alex Katz: Seasons at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2024, yet they remain remarkable works in their own right. Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul also presents three large-scale paintings from his illustrious series of Lilies (2025), which, alongside three small-scale studies of flora, elucidate Katz’s process of Matissean formal purification. The artist translates the impulsive, interwoven brushwork of the preliminary paintings into his inimitably pared-back visual vocabulary. The quivering haptic petals of Study for Lilies (2025) morph into majestic diaphanous tepals in Lilies 6 (2025), which retain the indelible impression that Katz crystallised initially.
