Alex Katz: Cutouts

by Carter Ratcliff, Alex Katz, Edenek Felix

One of the most important exponents of figurative realism, Alex Katz has been painting mainly portraits for more than 50 years. In his work, Katz records small incidents, momentary excerpts from reality. The people depicted seem melancholy, awash in an always flawless beauty which lends them a coolness verging on lifeless. Without ever cutting too deep, Katz's focus remains on the brilliance of surface--both his paintings' and his subjects'. Since the beginning of the 60s, Katz has been quoting the oversized formats of large-scale Pepsi and Lucky Strike advertisements and the dramatic compositions of film directors like Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Simultaneously, if somewhat less famously, he 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. The exquisite book at hand presents, for the first time, a broad selection of Katz's silhouette sculptures.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1979