Alex Katz: Small Paintings 1951–2002

Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of small paintings by American artist Alex Katz. For his first exhibition with the gallery, Katz has brought together a selection of forty small paintings that span his career from the 1950s through to recently completed works.
 
Alex Katz is one of America’s most important post-war painters, known for his monumental paintings of flat landscapes, his wife Ada, people at a party or the beach. Now in his seventies, Katz’s energy and focus is producing works that he says would have been artistically impossible for him ten years previously.
 
This exhibition concentrates on the small paintings of Alex Katz, revealing a substantial body of work that shows a continuity of concerns between Katz’s first decade as an artist and the latest small paintings fresh from the studio. These small paintings present the artist’s response to a single homogenous moment. In the capturing of a specific light and fragile movement the small paintings are very different to the neutralised and unified images of Katz’s large format, and often monumental, paintings.
 
Katz’s small paintings have long been collected, but rarely discussed or exhibited. The retrospective ‘Small Paintings’ at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York last year (currently travelling to Museums across the USA) has led the re-evaluation of the small paintings as an important body of work.
 
Alex Katz has exhibited widely throughout the world. Last month saw the opening of the impressive retrospective ‘In Your Face’ at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany. Katz is included in the group painting show ‘Cher Peintre’ opening at the Centre Pompidou, Paris  on 12th June. This exhibition at Timothy Taylor gallery will be the artist’s first in London since the large and influential solo show at The Saatchi Gallery in 1998.