Alex Katz: One Flight Up

Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on 12 October 2007 of a new 600 square metre gallery at 15 Carlos Place, W1, designed by Eric Parry architects.

Carlos Place opens with a solo exhibition by the renowned post-war American painter Alex Katz. Now in his 80th year, Katz’s work is instantly recognisable: large scale, pared down and cropped, displaying what Roberta Smith calls his ‘unique, unorthodox brand of modernism’, which he uses to render scenes from modern life: cocktail parties, beaches, barbeques, as well as landscape, cityscapes and portraits.

This representative exhibition features a notable early and rare sculpture One Flight Up, from 1968, in which cut-out heads of Manhattan’s populous party scene are pegged onto one single vast chest-high table. The exhibition will also include the Man in White Shirt series from 1995-1996, Walking on the Beach, 2002 and the recent Winter Landscape, 2006.

A contemporary of Jasper Johns and Elsworth Kelly, Alex Katz became active in the New York art scene in the 1950s, at a time when it was dominated by the recent legacy of Abstract Expressionism. What Katz achieved over time was a combining of his admiration for the heroic grandeur of Pollock or Newman and his interest in the everyday details of life, or as Robert Rosenblum calls it, ‘an impossible marriage of the grand and the small, of the epic and the humble’.

Now one of the most significant artists of the post-war American art scene, One Flight Up demonstrates the freshness and vitality that has made Katz such an influential figure for today’s younger artists.