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  Alex Katz, Hard Days Ahead, 2010

Alex Katz, Hard Days Ahead

Hard Days Ahead is an edition of 30 prints available for sale. For more information on purchasing this work, please contact Managing Director Beatrice Johnson at: beatrice@ARTonAIR.org, or by phone at 212 964 9806.

 
 
About the Artist
Alex Katz is a leading figure painter of the new realism movement in contemporary art. Katz created iconic paintings documenting the American scene and later the American landscape through understated but monumental glimpses of the vernacular world.

Katz (b. 1927) grew up in Queens, N.Y. He studied painting and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques at The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan from 1946 to 1949. In 1949 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he began to work more closely from the landscape. When Katz moved to Manhattan in 1950, Abstract Expressionism was the reigning style, and he and such figurative artists as Fairfield Porter and Philip Pearlstein struggled against the prevailing artistic trend. Indeed, Katz at first rendered the figure in a painterly style, looking to the example of Abstract Expressionism. This manner of painting quickly gave way in the mid-1950s to a flatter, more reductive way of painting. His great admiration for Henri Matisse and the School of Paris is evident in his work, as is his interest in the American vernacular tradition from the Ashcan School through Pop art.

In addition to painting, Katz also contributed to the print renaissance of the 1960s by making lithographs and screen prints.

In 1997 The Institute for Comtemporary Art/PS1 Museum in New York organized the exhibition "Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscapes 1951-1995", which was curated by Clocktower Gallery Director Alanna Heiss.