"Part of what I'm about is seeing how I can paint the same thing differently instead of the different things the same way." 

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. Katz was raised by his Russian émigré parents, both of whom were interested in poetry and the arts. In 1946, Katz entered The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan. At Cooper Union, Katz studied painting and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”

Katz’s first one-person show was held at the Roko Gallery in 1954. Katz had begun to develop a circle of acquaintances within the second generation New York School painters, figurative painters and poets, including Frank O’Hara. In the late 1950s, he made a decision to attempt greater realism in his paintings. He became increasingly interested in portraiture and painted his friends and in particular his wife and muse, Ada. In the 1960s, he shifted to painting directly on shaped aluminum sheets, a practice which has continued throughout his career, forming a series of freestanding or wall-mounted portraits that exist in actual space.

In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. In the 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Katz focused much of his attention on large landscape paintings, which he characterizes as “environmental.” At the beginning of the new millennium, Katz also began painting flowers in profusion, covering canvases in blossoms similar to those he had first explored in the late 1960s. Beginning in 2010, Katz literally re-framed his subject matter by employing more drastic cropping of the individual portraits. 

Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951. Works by Alex Katz can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National