Page 55 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

Installation view, Alex Katz: Gathering, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
October 21, 2022–February 20, 2023. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams and Midge
Wattles © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 

A number of portrait subjects recur in the course of eminent group of writers who have responded to Katz’s
the loosely chronological installation, most notably work at different points in his career, cohering into an
Ada Katz, the accomplished research biologist and illuminating document of the artist’s rich and mutable
Fulbright scholar whom the artist married in 1958 critical reception from the 1950s to the present day.
and has depicted over a thousand times since. A series of digital productions will complement the
Described by the poet Frank O’Hara as “a presence retrospective, including a newly captured and intimate
and at the same time a pictorial conceit of style,” Ada video portrait of the artist at work and an audio guide
functions as the iconographic heart of Katz’s work, highlighting observations by Guggenheim curators and
a physiognomy and a subjectivity studied across the notable sitters who appear in Katz’s paintings, including
arc of both the subject’s individual life and the artist’s choreographer Bill T. Jones, poet Vincent Katz, composer
creative development. Meredith Monk, and poet Anne Waldman.
Emerging as an artist in the mid-20th century, Katz
The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the
featuring eleven newly commissioned essays by David energy and distillation of Abstract Expressionist
Breslin, Katherine Brinson, Jennifer Y. Chuong, David canvases with the American vernaculars of the
Max Horowitz, Arthur Jafa, Katie Kitamura, Wayne magazine, billboard, and movie screen. He has
Koestenbaum, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Kevin Lotery, turned to his direct surroundings in downtown New
Prudence Peiffer, and Levi Prombaum. In addition York City and coastal Maine as his primary subject
to an extensive plates section and comprehensive matter throughout his career, engaging the traditional
exhibition and publication histories, the book contains painterly subjects of portraiture, genre scenes of
a Sourcebook of 36 reviews, texts, and poems from an everyday life, and landscape.

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