Alex Katz - Summer in Maine - Exhibitions

This show included a selection of works by the American artist Alex Katz (b. Brooklyn, 1927), painted in summer 2013 while in Maine. Once in a Lifetime, the retrospective of Katz’s works that inaugurated this espace in late 2010, received overwhelming acclaim from critics and public alike, and this exhibition offered Madrid a fresh opportunity to see recent works by one of the most important painters of his generation in an incomparable setting.

Summer in Maine brought together examples of two of Katz’s most abiding interests, portrait and landscape, and evokes the summer months spent by the artist with family and friends on Penobscot Bay, Maine. Since the 1960s, Katz has developed an innovative style of realism, distinctive for its simplicity of line, shape and colour. His canvases are usually on a large scale and his recurrent subjects are the people and places that he knows best: members of his family and friends, and his surroundings in New York’s SoHo and the natural landscapes of coastal Maine.

These recent paintings communicate, in their economy of line and subtle use of colour, the firmness and clarity of a vision maintained throughout his career. These are images that are clear, sharp, luminous and essential, combining abstract elements with realism; the palette is limited but intense, sensuous and bold, with light-handed brushwork, placing the subjects within a special, two-dimensional perspective, and creating a style that defies being pigeonholed.

Alex Katz found his place in the American art scene towards the end of the 1950s with an aesthetic that reacted against the dominance of Abstract Expressionism and anticipated Pop Art, marrying abstraction and post-war realism in a figurative style that he called "totally American". With the Abstract Expressionists he shared an interest in large-scale formats and their emphasis on the painting’s surface plane. In common with Pop Art, he relished the influence of the new media, the use of flat, bright colour and a preference for scenes of daily life without any need for further meaning but, rather than focusing on graphic elements, he chose to explore light as the essential means of modulating the picture’s surface. His interest in the creative forms of popular culture—cinema, advertising, comics, photography—brought him close to the plastic sensibility of younger artists on the scene.