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

Bob Thompson & Candida Alvarez @ Gray Gallery, NYC - "Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez" Exhibition

Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez

Real Monsters in Bold Colors

Gray Gallery, New York

April 30 - July 3, 2025

GRAY announces Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, an exhibition exploring the interplay between two artists who have reshaped the discourse of figurative and abstract traditions. The exhibition brings together works by BOB THOMPSON (1937-1966), who exhibited with GRAY in the first decade of the gallery’s history, with new paintings by CANDIDA ALVAREZ (b. 1955) in the gallery’s first project with the artist. 

This exhibition highlights the two artists’ use of color and form as vehicles for storytelling, while underscoring their distinct approaches to rebuffing and reimagining the painting traditions that preceded them. Real Monsters in Bold Colors offers a view into the working practice of contemporary artist, Candida Alvarez, by way of the work of Bob Thompson. The exhibition reveals how artists find inspiration in their surroundings, often borrowing, expanding, and riffing off of historical sources as well as other artists, poets, and musicians to make their work.

The exhibition title is derived from an essay on Bob Thompson written by the late poet Hettie Jones (1934-2024) whose close ties with the artist reflects a deep understanding of his vision and conveys the multifarious energy of the creative landscape in 1960s New York. Jones’s language conveys the anxiety of representing humanity and rehashing images and allegories of the past at a time when abstraction was on the rise, but also notes that as a young poet seeing the work, “we also saw the future in those multicolored worlds.” 

Bob Thompson is represented in the exhibition with a selection of paintings and works on paper from 1960-65. Thompson is best known for his kaleidoscopic compositions that revalue the work of Old Masters and the allegories within them. His distortions and reconfigurations of familiar compositions flattened and obfuscated figures as a way to insert his voice into the canon of art history. This sentiment resonates deeply for Candida Alvarez who emerged as an artist in New York twenty years later in a similarly interdisciplinary milieu. 

Alvarez’s energetic and colorful abstractions likewise draw from art historical motifs as well as her lived experience. Seeded by her daily life, her memories, photographs, and the art and music that inspires her, her compositions evolve, organically, into collage-like abstractions in rhythmic, saturated color. Candida Alvarez states, “Very few painters admit to their influences. However, Bob Thompson gave me the courage to push that relationship, to look at paintings and use them as a beginning point. In fact, I have looked at several painters intently, including de Kooning, Picasso and even Piero della Francesca and now Thompson.” Thompson’s silhouetted and flattened figures reflect a transitional space between abstraction and figuration, an in between space that Alvarez pushes further in her own work. She continues, “Thompson’s work is my liberation. Why not a pink, red or brown body frolicking under a tree?” For her first major New York gallery show since the 1990s and her first project with GRAY,  Candida Alvarez is creating new paintings using Thompson’s compositions as a starting point. Real Monsters in Bold Colors will coincide with Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the first large-scale museum survey of her work at El Museo del Barrio.

Real Monsters in Bold Colors is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Hendrik Folkerts, curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Candida Alvarez participates courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL.

CANDIDA ALVAREZ

Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, New York, lives and works in Baroda, Michigan) is an artist and educator whose artistic career spans five decades. Her vibrant, multi-layered works are intricate arrangements of visual fragments from her life. She is fascinated by the interplay of color, texture, form, and the tactile and emotional qualities of paint. Regarded as one of her generation’s most innovative and experimental painters, Alvarez’s kaleidoscopic abstract and figurative works weave together personal and cultural memory, art historical references, wordplay, and everyday life.

Candida Alvarez was raised in Brooklyn by parents who migrated from Puerto Rico, and emerged as an artist in the late 1970s. While pursuing her bachelor of fine arts at Fordham University, she was working as a curator at El Museo del Barrio. Her first exhibition was at the Museo in 1977, in a group show called Confrontación: Ambiente y Espacio. In the early 1980s, she worked in a studio as part of the International Studio and Workspace Program at PS1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1). She also participated in the foundational artist in residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. These experiences were critical to Alvarez’s development as an artist, connecting her with the wider network of artists, community, conversation and collaboration. After attending Yale for graduate school, Candida Alvarez accepted a teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. In the artist’s words “New York was where I became an artist. Chicago is where I expanded my vision.”

Candida Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1981), Studio Museum in Harlem (1985), Pilchuck Glass School (1998), and LUMA Foundation (2023), among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award (2024), the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award (2022), and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (2022). Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Denver Art Museum; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Seattle Art Museum; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Addison Gallery of American Art; Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

BOB THOMPSON

Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was an American artist who experienced a brief but prolific career, spanning eight years, he produced several hundred paintings, drawings, and oil studies. Bob Thompson was highly regarded for his reworkings of traditional compositions of “Old Masters” such as Raphael and Goya, into which he integrated vibrant colors and modernist shapes. Influenced by jazz, Thompson’s art is full of freedom and rhythm.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937 Bob Thompson began to study art with Expressionist Ulfert Wilke at the University of Louisville in 1957. Thompson visited Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1958, where he encountered the expressive work of Jan Müller, Hans Hofmann, and Red Grooms and met many of the artists who would soon after become his peers when he moved to New York. He first traveled to Europe through a travel grant from the Walter Gutman Foundation in 1960, where he was able to study the masterworks with which his practice was in conversation first-hand. Bob Thompson returned to the US, renting an apartment in the Lower East Side in 1963. In the same year, GRAY first exhibited Bob Thompson in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. The following year, in 1964, GRAY held a solo exhibition for the artist and was included in Yale University’s influential Seven Young Painters exhibition. In 1966, before his 29th birthday, Bob Thompson passed in Rome from surgery complications. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, among others.

GRAY NEW YORK

1018 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10075

www.richardgraygallery.com