Elizabeth

Alex Katz, born in Brooklyn, New York, has spent over 70 years since his first solo exhibition in 1954 developing a distinctive style of painting. He depicts his family, friends, and surroundings with traditional techniques and compositions, earning recognition as one of America’s foremost artists. Katz works across various mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking.

When Katz moved to Manhattan in the late 1950s, the American art scene was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, with Jackson Pollock’s action painting and Mark Rothko’s color fields leading the movement. However, Katz consistently focused on portraiture, diverging from the prevailing abstract trends. Over time, his work evolved towards a flat and reductive style, incorporating multi-panel compositions. Beyond painting, Katz experimented with collages, lithography, and screen printing, pushing the boundaries of his artistic expression.

Katz simplifies figures, flowers, and landscapes into flat planes of color, capturing American life and landscapes with a symbolic and unique approach. His hallmark techniques include arranging multiple perspectives of a subject on a single, large canvas; employing thin, flat background colors; using the cutout method of painting on flat panels and cutting out their outlines; and applying the wet-on-wet technique, where new brushstrokes are layered onto still-wet paint.

Elizabeth is a portrait of the artist’s acquaintance, Elizabeth, who frequently appears in Katz’s work. Her depiction from multiple angles is set against a thin, flat background, creating a calm and elegant atmosphere characteristic of Katz’s portraits.