GRAY is pleased to present Alex Katz: Autumn is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at GRAY. Created between 2022 and 2023, across eleven monumental canvases, Katz depicts the vibrant foliage, sweeping fields, and windblown trees of the changing season.
The exhibition is currently on view at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue) through November 11, 2023 and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a new poem by Vincent Katz.
Autumn 8, 2022
The exhibition follows his lauded career retrospective, Gathering, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the fall of 2022.
As Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson described: “[One] might be surprised by the unbound rapture of the landscape paintings that have consumed much of the artist’s still-considerable energy in recent years. But [these works] are in fact the culmination of a lifelong artistic project that aspires to compress everything into ‘a single burst of energy… to paint it wide open.’”
Autumn 10, 2023
Alex Katz has painted figures and landscapes in equal measure throughout his career. Expressed in vivid color, the paintings exhibited in Autumn present enveloping compositions measuring as wide as fourteen feet.
“I started to think about the environmental landscapes [as] being really an environment that wraps around you,” Katz notes, “There is no narrative. You’re dealing with perception.”
The paintings are exhibited alongside a series of sixteen new portraits on paper. Each drawing possesses an economy of line and is titled after its sitter – Vivien, Niki, Levi, Isaac, Vincent, and others– in reference to the friends, family members, poets, dancers, and artists most central to the artist’s life.
Broadway for Paul
By Vincent Katz
Encounter
for Oliver
Yesterday, as we walked from the town,
And the light faded from the sky,
I thought, How striking
The dark shapes of buoys and barks
In front of the still bay, and land opposite
And I thought, Poetry cannot suffice
For this, only painting could evince
This light, and evincing might
Reach an equivalent sense of calm
Or overview, photography could not
Then my son said, Don't under-
Estimate the power of the word,
And I thought, Perhaps? This morn,
Again I see the sea, land opposite,
Boats and air and clouds, and wonder
Autumn 4, 2022
Oil on linen
54 ⅜ × 108 ⅜ in.
138.1 × 275.3 cm
Autumn 8, 2022
Oil on linen
84 ¼ × 84 ⅜ in.
214.2 × 214.5 cm
Autumn 10, 2023
Oil on linen
48 ¼ × 60 ¼ in.
122.6 × 153 cm
Autumn 13, 2023
Oil on linen
48 ¼ × 72 ¼ in.
122.6 × 183.5 cm
Autumn 16, 2023
Oil on linen
66 ¼ × 36 ¼ in.
168.3 × 92.1 cm
Autumn 17, 2023
Oil on linen
120 ¼ × 120 ¼ in.
305.4 × 305.4 cm
Autumn 20, 2023
Oil on linen
96 ¼ × 48 ⅜ in.
244.5 × 123 cm
Autumn 27, 2023
Oil on linen
96 ¼ × 96 ⅜ in.
244.6 × 244.8 cm
Field's End 3, 2022
Oil on linen
108 ⅜ × 60 ⅝ in.
275.3 × 154 cm
Field's End 4, 2022
Oil on linen
132 ¼ × 72 ¼ in.
335.9 × 183.5 cm
Tree Top 3, 2022
Oil on linen
84 ¼ × 168 ½ in.
214 × 428 cm
Aaron, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Alex, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Grace, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Isaac, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Josh, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Levi, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Matthew, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Niki, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Oliver, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Robert, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Rudi, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Tim, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Vincent, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Vivien, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Vivien, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
Vivien, 2022
Ink on paper
17 × 13 ⅞ in. (43.2 × 35.2 cm)
Framed: 20 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (51.3 × 43.5 × 3.8 cm)
PUBLICATION
To accompany the exhibition, GRAY is pleased to present the exhibition catalogue Alex Katz: Autumn. The book features a poem by Vincent Katz and 27 color illustrations of the works on view.
Alex Katz, photographed in his New York City studio on June 16, 2022. Photo: Alec Soth.
ABOUT ALEX KATZ
Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.” Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world, including a career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2022-2023).
Katz's work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
