Image: Pablo Gómez - Zuloaga
"The static figures against a flat background, the double portrait, the cutouts, the group layouts, the landscapes, and the large faces are areas which I have explored since the early days of my career. They have been used in many ways, in movies, sets, illustration and painting. I think my style can be easily approached."
Alex Katz working in his studio, New York, 2009. Image: Vivien Bittencourt
"Katz's work is more abstract today but his subject matter of landscapes, friends, recreational scenes of middle-class America, and his wife and muse Ada is consistent and even timeless. (...) One of the most repected living American artists and a well-known figure in New York, Katz was never as widely known on the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps now he will receive the in-depth attention he deserves."
Lucy Rees, FlashArt #289, March - April 2013
"I like to make a painting that you can stick anywhere; that is the idea. The Times Square commission (Times Square Mural, 1977) was where I did it. Finally I stuck a work in the middle of Times Square and it held up. It doesn't make it a better painting necessarily than a Rothko. It's a different idea."
Alex Katz at his studio, 1964. Image: Jack Mitchell
"At 95, Katz is one of the most singular painters in American art, a card-carrying believer in the postwar New York School of Painting, but one who disdained to join or was excluded from its blue-chip elites — Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Color Field. Nonetheless he absorbed aspects of all of them, sometimes before they formed. He was a loner, never part of the Castelli Gallery crowd nor an anointed art star in the manner of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol or Frank Stella with high auction prices, secure art-historical niches or fawning acolytes".
Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 20 October 2022
