Alex Katz. Claire, Grass and Water

The Giorgio Cini Foundation presents Claire, Grass and Water, an exhibition of new works by American artist Alex Katz. The exhibition coincides with the 60th Venice Biennale and follows the artist's recent successful retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. It is specially conceived for the spaces on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore and stages three major groups of works created between 2021 and 2022. It is an unprecedented cycle on three key aspects of Katz's poetics, the boundaries of which have continued to expand over the course of his seventy-year career. In the Carnelutti Room, close-ups of inked oceans and meadows in shades of green and yellow can be admired, along with a series of paintings inspired by the clothes of the 1950s American fashion designer Claire McCardell.

The curator Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, tells how the exhibition is "the extraordinary result of two years of work, in which Alex Katz has measured himself against the visual power of the city of water: not only has he extracted from the places of his memory the abyssal oceans and the intense and captivating nature, but he has also taken up the tradition of the large pictorial canvases. As in a game of seduction, Katz has added the homage to Claire McCardell, reviving the discourse on what simple elegance and sophisticated curiosity mean. A tribute that will never cease to surprise us, opening us to the discovery of a visionary woman, still little known in Europe".

More information: Fondazione Giorgio Cini