Alex Katz @ Gray Gallery, Chicago - "White Lotus" Exhibition

Alex Katz: White Lotus

Gray Gallery, Chicago

July 11 - September 20, 2025

Though titled after the hit television show about a resort hotel and the psychosocial relations of its guests and employees, White Lotus by Alex Katz bears no – or perhaps a mysterious – relation to HBO’s dark comedy. Opened at GRAY’s Chicago gallery on July 11, 2025, two weeks before the artist turns 98 years old, White Lotus is a testament not only to Katz’s nonstop creative output, but also his status as one of the most groundbreaking American artists of both the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Throughout his many years of relentless production, Alex Katz has propelled American painting through his cool, flat depictions of figures and landscapes, and yet, he has also managed to avoid the pigeonholings of Pop, Realism, and Minimalism. As Calvin Tomkins noted in his 2018 profile of Alex Katz for The New Yorker, “He has always had his own direction, which has not been the direction of mainstream art in any of the last seven decades.” This path has always been guided, in part, by the tools of cinema, through his use of monumental canvas, dramatic lighting, and repeating figures.  

Painted in 2023, the year of the artist’s celebrated Guggenheim retrospective, the paintings in this exhibition do not depict characters or scenes from The White Lotus television show – in fact, Katz has only watched part of a single episode. Known for painting people close to him – most notably his wife Ada, son Vincent, and daughter-in-law Vivien-- the figures painted by Katz in this suite are strangers by comparison. They are based on photographs he took while on a beach in Maine, where Katz has kept a summer home since 1954. Each of the eleven paintings in White Lotus portray two beachgoing figures, a man and a woman, with three different pairs depicted. 

Closely cropped onto the figures’ faces and torsos – a technique partly inspired by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni – the paintings contain enigmatic atmospheres, alternating between tension and sensuality, delivered in Katz’s signature brushstroke: broad and dispassionate, a seamless marriage of representation and abstraction. As curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete notes in his essay for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, the figures “aren’t really meant to be ‘people,’ but symbols instead – though symbols of what, exactly, remains eerily, satisfyingly unresolved, frozen in the blinding glare of New England’s summer light.” 

Alex Katz: White Lotus is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete, Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at University of Chicago.

ARTIST ALEX KATZ

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2024, Alex Katz received a National Medal of Arts. 

GRAY CHICAGO

2044 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago, Il 60612

www.richardgraygallery.com

Shifting Horizons @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - An exhibition of paintings featuring landscapes by Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, Robert Zandvliet

Shifting Horizons

Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, Robert Zandvliet

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

June 5 – July 25, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Shifting Horizons, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper featuring landscapes by Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, and Robert Zandvliet. 

Shifting Horizons assembles five contemporary artists whose intimately scaled landscapes reflect a shared sensitivity to the nuances of place, perception, and memory. Working at a modest size in these works, Diamond, Katz, Ray, Wittenberg, and Zandvliet approach the natural world not as a fixed subject but as a space for exploration—where observation and emotion converge. These works transcend straightforward representation, instead offering distilled moments that evoke atmosphere, light, and spatial rhythm. Whether rooted in direct experience or shaped by recollection, the landscapes presented here invite a slower way of seeing.

Nancy Diamond’s recent works on paper explore the interplay between natural observation and imaginative transformation. Utilizing watercolor and gouache, she creates layered compositions of clouded skies, often inspired by her time in the Catskills. These images shift between the recognizable and the abstract, reflecting a space between recording and reimagining. Her attention to form and subtle variation invites viewers into a quiet terrain that considers both detail and broader view, where the natural world is shaped by personal perspective. Within this space, a subtle bodily presence emerges, connecting internal and external, inviting contemplation on how perception and memory mediate experience. Diamond’s palette suggests changing weather, fading light, and quiet transitions—moments that feel both observed and remembered. Diamond received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and she received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. Select recent exhibitions include FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2024); Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY (2024); and KARMA, Thomaston, ME (2024).

Alex Katz’s small-scale landscape paintings on board reveal a more immediate and spontaneous side of his iconic practice of larger scale flattened forms. Often painted en plein air or quickly from memory, they emphasize light, seasonal shifts, and spatial rhythm. The landscapes on board are concise yet expansive, balancing on the cusp of abstraction and representation. In these works, Katz revisits familiar locations—Maine woods, waterlines, and fields—with a sense of closeness, reinforcing his enduring fascination with perception, time, and the American landscape. Katz studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Cooper Union, and he received the National Medal of Arts and Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy Museum. Select recent solo exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2024); The Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2023); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022-23).

Eleanor Ray’s intimately scaled landscape paintings distill complex spatial and emotional experiences into panels, often no larger than a notebook page. Working primarily in oil on panel, she captures the essence of places—ranging from the American West to the Caribbean—through a synthesis of memory, observation, and abstraction. Her compositions are informed by drawings, photographs, and recollections, allowing her to reconstruct scenes with a focus on light, atmosphere, and architectural framing. This approach results in works that are both specific and universal, inviting viewers into a contemplative space that transcends the depicted locale. Ray’s restrained palette and subtle brushwork evoke a sense of quietude and introspection, demonstrating how modestly scaled works can convey resonance. Ray received an MFA from the New York Studio School and received awards from The Edward F. Albee Foundation and NYFA Fellowship in Painting. Select recent exhibitions include Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022); and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022).

Nicole Wittenberg’s works are expressively rich. Beyond rendering naturalistic topography or scenery, living entities emerge in her images as through sensation or perception: a torrent of water, the twist of a leaf, the glare of afternoon light on the bark of a tree, all suggestive of fleeting moments and a subjective view. In a textural play of color and movement, they convey her affective relationship to the natural world, as well as nature’s evanescent traits. While Wittenberg captures the physical reality of Maine’s coastal forests, wetlands, and meadows, she more closely works with light, with the transit of the sun through the sky, as well as her own positioning within the dense and verdant landscape. Wittenberg received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ John Koch Award. Select recent solo exhibitions include Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME (2025); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2025); and Maison la Roche, Paris, France (2025).

Robert Zandvliet’s works on paper—each horizontal and measuring 9 x 12 inches—demonstrate an intuitive and meditative engagement with landscape and mark-making. Using egg tempera, oil, or a combination, Zandvliet treats each paper surface as a space for distilled experimentation, balancing gesture, color, and form. They operate like visual thoughts: rhythmic, atmospheric, and charged with a sense of immediacy. Despite their uniform size, the works vary in tone, yet all reflect his ongoing investigation into the essence of painting itself. Zandvliet’s process reveals a careful calibration between control and spontaneity, echoing the structure of historical Dutch landscape painting while pushing toward abstraction. Robert Zandvliet received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands and received a Prix de Rome and the Wolvekamp Prize. Select recent exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2022); Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland (2022); and Dordrechts Museum, Dordrechts, Netherlands (2020, 2019).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com 

Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - Exhibition curated by Achim Hochdörfer with Lena Tilk

Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes  

Museum Brandhorst, Munich  

Through 16 February 2025 

ALEX KATZ, who celebrates his 97th birthday this year, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary painting. During his long career, which has now spanned more than 70 years, he has dedicated himself to depicting the here and now, which is why he has described his art as “painting in the present tense.”

Alex Katz has donated two paintings to Museum Brandhorst. An early work from 1958, showing the painter and sculptor George Ortman, and a recent, very personal double portrait of his wife Ada and his son Vincent. To mark this generous donation, Museum Brandhorst is presenting the exhibition “Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes,” which, in addition to the two new acquisitions, also presents the rich inventory of work by the artist held by the Brandhorst Collection. Following the major monographic exhibition Alex Katz in 2018-2019, the current show once again brings together major works from all his creative phases.

ALEX KATZ: PORTRAITS

In his portraits, Alex Katz depicts family members, acquaintances and artist friends – whether individually or in groups – with an almost simple monumentality. His flair for painterly surfaces stands in an exciting relationship to the formal language of film, fashion and advertising. This is one of the reasons why Alex Katz is also celebrated as a forerunner of Pop Art.

One of Alex Katz’s major works is “The Black Dress” (1960), in which he depicts his wife Ada six times, each time in an elegant black cocktail dress. The repetition of one and the same figure is reminiscent of a film strip, comparable to the serial character of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, created a few years later.From an early stage, Katz found important allies and aesthetic inspiration among contemporary poets, musicians and dancers. Museum Brandhorst owns two iconic pictures of the choreographer Paul Taylor (1930–2018) and his Dance Company. Taylor stands before us in this 1959 portrait with a sense of challenging calm. His tense strength suggests that he could jump out of the picture at any moment and start dancing. As Alex Katz later recalled, “I had seen Paul dance for the first time shortly before we met... and thought his choreography was one of the most surprising things I had seen as an artist. Paul’s dancing seemed to be a real break with that of the previous generation: no expression, no content, no form, as he said, and with great technique and intelligence.”

ALEX KATZ: LANDSCAPES

Alex Katz celebrated his first successes in the New York art scene at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Yet he always remained committed to figurative painting. It was only late, in the mid-1980s, that he approached gestural abstraction in his landscapes and cityscapes. The branches, twigs and leaves in his paintings are reminiscent of the spontaneous gestures and ‘drip paintings’ of Jackson Pollock. Each individual brushstroke can be read figuratively and at the same time appears as an autonomous visual sign.

In some of these paintings, the light itself – whether direct, reflected, or diffuse – becomes the defining theme. Reflections in water and depictions in fog or at dusk often serve as a means of capturing the moods of different times of day.  “These are all very fleeting things, quickly over,” says Alex Katz. “I have captured twilight in landscapes that can only be seen for a quarter of an hour. That fascinates me because it’s real high-speed perception.”

ALEX KATZ: STUDIES

With their clear design and masterful technique, Alex Katz’s paintings convey the impression of great ease, as if they had come naturally into the world. However, their creation process is much more complex. Alex Katz’s large-format paintings on canvas usually develop from smaller oil studies that are created on prepared hardboard. For his landscapes, he usually sketches the same scenery at the same time in the same place on successive days and finally selects the one that seems most interesting to him in order to enlarge it to scale. Due to their sketch-like spontaneity, these studies have a special aesthetic appeal.

THE DONATIONS OF ALEX KATZ: “George Ortman” and “Ada and Vincent”

Even at the age of 96, Alex Katz is still an enormously productive artist, as the more recent of his two donations, “Ada and Vincent,” proves. There are 65 years between "Ada and Vincent" from 2023 and "George Ortman" from 1958. The donations bridge the gap between his early and late work and enable an examination of aesthetic and thematic leitmotifs over the course of his 70-year career. Both works provide insights into Alex Katz’s very personal family environment and are also contemporary documents of the social and artistic milieu in downtown New York in the 1950s. A juxtaposition of landscapes and portraits shows how virtuously and playfully Alex Katz navigates between improvised gestures and cool realism, traditional painting and the exploration of photography and film.

Alex Katz, who was born in 1927 and has since inspired generations of painters, is one of the most important artists in the Brandhorst Collection alongside Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly – both of whom were born in 1928. Anette and Udo Brandhorst were passionate admirers and supporters of Alex Katz from an early age. The artist’s generous donation is due not least to this close relationship.

Curated by Achim Hochdörfer with Lena Tilk.

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

ALEX KATZ: PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES 

MUSEUM BRANDHORST, MUNICH - 22 MARCH 2024 - 16 FEBRUARY 2025

Alex Katz Retrospective Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Alex Katz

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

6 December 2018 – 22 April 2019

The Museum Brandhorst presents a major exhibition of works by celebrated American painter Alex Katz. A towering figure in contemporary painting best known for his iconic portraits of beautiful, stylish women, masterfully rendered in bold, vibrant colors, Alex Katz has influenced and inspired generations of artists around the world. Featuring about ninety works—including some of the artist’s most important paintings—the exhibition offers visitors a retrospective overview of this seminal artist’s oeuvre from the 1950s to today.

ALEX KATZ (born 1927, New York) emerged on the New York scene during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and just prior to the explosion of Pop Art. Although he is often hailed as one of the precursors to Pop, his aesthetic is perhaps more closely aligned with such poets as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery than with other painters of his generation. His unique oeuvre, which now spans some 70 years, is utterly devoted to the representation of the here and now and the immediacy of human perception—a commitment to what the artist has often described as “painting in the present tense.” Working variously en plein air, from photographic sources, and from his own sketches and preparatory drawings, he has focused his attention on subject matter from his immediate milieu: portraits of family (in particular his wife Ada) and friends, artistic collaborators and scenes of social interaction, landscapes and architectural scenes, and flowers. Throughout, Alex Katz’s sensitivity for painterly surfaces unfolds in productive tension with the formal languages of film, fashion, and advertising.

The exhibition begins with works from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including portraits of the renowned choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor and his company, for which Alex Katz designed many sets. A series of seminal single and group portraits from the 1960s establish Alex Katz’s signature style as well as the social and artistic milieu of Downtown New York, both of which remain leitmotifs throughout his work and the exhibition. Two large galleries of landscapes show Alex Katz playing at the edge of abstraction while at the same time recommitting himself to a decidedly modern form of realism.

The quality of light itself, whether direct, reflected, or diffused, becomes a central concern in these paintings. So, too, does the ability of an individual brushstroke to delimit multiple different types of form while also retaining its status as an autonomous mark.

Also on display is a sizable collection of small oil paintings, sketches, and preparatory drawings. Often directly related to the large-scale paintings on view, these works will provide visitors with an expanded understanding of the artist’s multi-layered working process.

The exhibition draws on the Museum Brandhorst’s own extensive collection of works by the artist—including masterpieces from across his long career—supplemented by key works from other public and private collections, and provides an extended glimpse into the prolific production of this 91-year-old painter.

 An abundantly illustrated catalogue was published by Hirmer Verlag, featuring newly commissioned texts on the artist by critic Kirsty Bell and art historian Prudence Peiffer, as well as reflections by contemporary artists Arturo Herrera, Jordan Kantor, and Matt Saunders (ISBN 978-3-7774-3237-3).

On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum premieres a new documentary film on Alex Katz, directed by Kristina Kilian of the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich. This project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Museum Brandhorst and the HFF.

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

Alex Katz @ Serpentine Gallery, London

Alex Katz
Serpentine Gallery, London
Through 11 September 2016

ALEX KATZ (b. 1927, USA) came of age as an artist at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Early studies at the modernist-based Cooper Union in New York City and plein air painting at the Skowhegan School in Maine were fundamental experiences for Alex Katz. Influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Alex Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954 and has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. Over the past five and a half decades, he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modem life, whose distinctive portraits and landscapes reinvent both genres within the context of abstract painting and contemporary image-making. The Serpentine exhibition brings together Alex Katz's extraordinarily productive output of recent years alongside works from across his career in an installation that responds and relates to the unique context of the Serpentine Gallery.

Serpentine Gallery, London
Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA 
www.serpentinegalleries.org

Icon / Iconoclast at Marlborough Chelsea, NYC - An Exhibition of Works by: Francis Bacon, Francesco Clemente, David Hockney, Robin Kahn, Alex Katz, R.B. Kitaj, Ouattara, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Terry Winters, Curated by Raymond Foye

Icon / Iconoclast

Marlborough Chelsea, New York

November 8 - December 27, 1997

An Exhibition of Works by:

Francis Bacon

Francesco Clemente

David Hockney

Robin Kahn

Alex Katz

R.B. Kitaj

Ouattara

Ad Reinhardt

Philip Taaffe

Fred Tomaselli

Terry Winters

Curated by Raymond Foye

Marlborough Chelsea presents an exhibition of paintings, Icon/Iconoclast. The exhibition, consisting of one work each by eleven artists, is about the persistent power of images in modern life. Even though creative strategies in the arts have varied widely in the past three decades, challenges to pictorialism seem only to strengthen the hold that certain images possess over us. Attempting to break or destroy imagery, artists have, in fact, created entirely new pictorial conceptions expanding our definition of what constitutes a picture. This paradox is expressed by the title of the exhibition.

Beginning with Ad Reinhardt's black painting as an ultimate statement of both the iconic and the iconoclastic impulses in art, the exhibition explores the many ways in which contemporary painters have sought to re-define the image within the formal traditions of Western art. 

Like Ad Reinhardt, Francis Bacon has served as a touchstone for subsequent generations of artists: in this case, painters who have sought to pursue aspects of figuration, portraiture, and the passions of the flesh. Yet, the attempt to instill in modern painting the secular equivalence of the experience of ecstasis - so integral to the art of the Renaissance - was a lifelong preoccupation with both these artists, each in their own way.

The iconic image stands as an object of mediation and contemplation and embodies a system of belief which may be communicated through narrative, metaphor, or allegory. The painters chosen in this exhibition may all be characterized by their commitment to expanding conceptions of picture-making by means of investigating the image itself. The mistrust for iconoclastic images, which persists to this day, springs from similar origins: that artists are conjurers of illusions, and may propagate false beliefs. Recently, similar criticism has been most sharply directed at artists employing figuration and representation such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Alex Katz, and Francesco Clemente.

In the work of Philip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli, figurative elements are deployed in the service of abstraction while preserving the flatness and frontality of the icon. Both artists explore a diagrammatic language akin to the mandala or symbolon: ritual configurations that speak to the inner working of an image and its correspondence to archaic forms. The wider perspective of the primacy of the aesthetic experience itself is the basis of the work of Terry Winters whose imagery finds its analogy in the complex nexus of biology and cognitive science.

Conceptualizations of the female body and aspects of women's roles in society have been the subject of recent work by Robin Kahn who draws on sources as diverse as history, alchemy and anthropology. The legacy of symbols which is the inheritance of iconography from Medieval and Renaissance times have functioned as source material for many of her works. In the work of Ouattara, an African artist from the Ivory Coast, the icon comes closest to its animist origins as mediator between the worlds of the human and the divine.

All of the living artists in Icon/Iconoclast are represented by new work. A centerpiece of the exhibition is a major ensemble of paintings and drawings by R.B. Kitaj constituting a single work, The Killer Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even, (1997). The subject of a controversial exhibition earlier this year at London's Royal Academy, the work is a visual rebuttal to the critical malign following Kitaj's retrospective and the subsequent death of his wife, Sandra, events which the artist relates in the work itself. It is Kitaj's farewell address to London, a final salvo launched at the same philistine cultural establishment that Ezra Pound once lampooned in his famous suite of poems, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

Icon/Iconoclast has been organized by Raymond Foye. Along with Francesco Clemente he is co-publisher of Hanuman Books, a press devoted to poetry, Hinduism, and writings by artists (a list that include William Burroughs, Rene Ricard, Francis Picabia, Willem deKooning, Cookie Mueller, René Daumal, Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank, Max Beckmann, Patti Smith and others). He has curated (with Ann Percy) a full scale retrospective of the works of Francesco Clemente, Three Worlds (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and over the past twenty years has edited books, catalogues and livres d'artiste by numerous artists in the exhibition, including David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Philip Taaffe, Terry Winters and Francesco Clemente. His published works on poets and poetry include James Schuyler (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), John Wieners (Black Sparrow Press), Bob Kaufman (New Directions) and Edgar Allan Poe (City Lights Books). He presently lives and works in New York City.

MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA

211 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.malgoroughgallery.com