“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Alex Katz: Gathering, a career retrospective staged in the city where Katz has lived and worked his entire life, and prepared with the close collaboration of the artist. On view from October 21, 2022, through February 20, 2023, the exhibition fills the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and an adjacent Tower Gallery. Encompassing paintings, oil sketches, collages, prints, and freestanding ‘cutout’ works, the show opens with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from his student days in the 1940s and culminates in the rapturous and immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.
“Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense. Writing in 1961, Katz noted that ‘Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness. Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.’ Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of ‘quick things passing,’ compressing the flux of everyday life into a vivid burst of optical perception.” — Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Installation views, Alex Katz: Gathering, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, October 21, 2022–February 20, 2023. Photos: Ariel Ione Williams and Midge Wattles © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Alex Katz: Gathering is organized by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art, with Terra Warren, Curatorial Assistant, and with additional support from Andrea Zambrano, Curatorial Assistant.
Title image: Alex Katz, Blue Umbrella 2, 1972. Oil on linen, 96 × 144 inches (243.8 × 365.8 cm). Private collection, New York. © 2022 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy private collection.