ALEX KATZ - CUTOUTS

ALEX KATZ (1927-)

This small, beautifully designed volume presents cutouts by Alex Katz-silhouette sculptures made of wood or aluminium in which the American artist highlights the emphatic two-dimensional quality of his figures.

Pictures by the American painter Alex Katz are today fetching top prices at premier galleries. One of the most important exponents of figurative realism, Katz has been painting mainly portraits for more than fifty years. In his works, Katz records small incidents, excerpts from reality. The people depicted seem melancholy but, at the same time, cool, almost lifeless, and are of a flawless beauty. Without cutting too deep, the painter´s focus remains on the brilliance of surfaces.
Since the beginning of the sixties, Alex Katz has been using the oversized formats typical of his style, inspired by advertisements of Pepsi, Lucky Strike or picture compositions by great film directors like Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. At roughly the same time, he also started to "cut out" his figure paintings in order to carry the surface quality of his depictions to the extreme - first in oil on wood, later in aluminum. This exquisite little book for the first time presents a broad selection of his silhouette sculptures, enabling readers to study Katz´s works from a new, unusual perspective.

Edited by Zdenek Felix, foreword by Zdenek Felix, texts by Carter Ratcliff