Alex Katz

Alex Katz | Out of Sight unites drawings from across Alex Katz’s career, offering an intimate look at his creative process. Bringing together more than seventy works—including never-before-exhibited drawings from the artist’s personal collection, works from the Colby Museum collection, and select loans from private and institutional collections—the exhibition demonstrates the extraordinary range of Katz’s explorations on paper.

From preparatory sketches to presentation drawings, collages, cartoons, and a selection of related paintings, the show offers a rare opportunity to engage with a lesser-known yet essential facet of the artist’s practice. New research for the exhibition sheds light on his working methods and reveals the process of discovery, experimentation, and revision that has been a hallmark of his oeuvre for eight decades.

Although best known for his large-scale paintings of his family, his creative milieu, and the landscape, it is drawing—intimately sized and employing simple materials—that initially fueled Katz’s artistic ambitions and continues to permeate his practice. Alongside early student works that record his efforts to train his eye and hand, the  exhibition reunites examples from every stage of Katz’s creative process, tracing the development of his motifs from preliminary sketches and finished drawings to cartoons and, ultimately, paintings. Inscribed with the time and labor of their own making, Katz’s drawings reveal the complex procedures that shape his decision making and experimentation. Seen together, they attune us to the very act of perception, revealing vision as a sustained, iterative inquiry, sharpened by technique and time.

Bringing into focus an under-recognized dimension of Katz’s fascinating practice, the exhibition foregrounds drawing as an engine of his creative and continually inventive process. It highlights the artist’s perspicacious observation, and in our present moment, his depictions of both the human figure and the natural world take on new inflections. In his preoccupation with the temporality of everyday life, concern with people in relation to one another, and attention to style and the way it changes over time, viewers encounter an artist deeply invested in the way we see and relate to the world around us.

Alex Katz | Out of Sight is curated by Kiko Aebi, Katz Curator at the Colby Museum. A richly illustrated catalogue will be published on the occasion of the show. In addition to newly commissioned texts by Aebi, Isabelle Derveaux, and Ingrid D. Rowland, the publication will feature an interview between the artist, Aebi, and Laura Neufeld, poems by John Godfrey, and a contribution by Rackstraw Downes.