Alex Katz’s New Paintings in Venice Celebrate Grass, Water, and Clothes

At 96, Alex Katz is showing new paintings of three highly different kinds in an exhibition that coincides with the Venice Biennale. “Claire, Grass and Water” at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini features 26 works made between 2021 and 2022, some of them in modes Katz hasn’t attempted before and some with a sense of scale bigger than he has worked with in his more than seven decades as a painter.

Thirteen works inspired by midcentury American fashion designer Claire McCardell channel the colorful figurative style for which Katz is best-known, but nine paintings of rippling ocean surfaces and four of grass are landscapes of a sort that is far less familiar.