May 20 - July 15, 2023
From McClain Gallery:
“McClain Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Alex Katz: Flowers, featuring a selection of floral paintings and a full set of prints from the artist’s recent Flowers Portfolio published in 2021.
Alex Katz is widely recognized as one of the most important American painters from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He had his first solo exhibition in 1954, after attending the now legendary Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan in the 1940s. Last year the Guggenheim Museum in New York City mounted a major retrospective titled Gathering spanning eight decades of artistic production. Katz’s oeuvre circles ideas of intimacy by revisiting domestic subjects, including family, friends, home, and temporality. His iconic portraits include a large trove of his wife, Ada, whom he has been painting since they married. His vibrant palette and scenic, stage-like cutouts anticipated the arrival of pop art, and his loose and effortlessly gestural figuration is instantly recognizable.
Katz began painting flowers in earnest at the turn of the 21st century. The floral works are characterized by their bold, vibrant colors and simplified forms. Continuing his use of large, flat fields of color as the backgrounds of his compositions, the artist turns his attention onto flora in the same manner he spends time with his human subjects. He focuses on the flowers’ morphology, flattening the complexity of the plant in favor of picking up its allure and personality. The finished works exude elegance, harmony, and balance. In his 1968 painting Pink Petunia, a tightly cropped single pink flower opens against a haze of green shadows, leaves, and stems. The extreme zoom of the layout allows the viewer to hone in on the beauty of the flower itself, rather than being distracted by extraneous details.
The Flowers Portfolio was published by Lococo Fine Art in 2021. Founded in 1990 by Robert Lococo, the publisher sees their work in printmaking as a way to facilitate the translation of the artist’s creative process through to its natural expansion into the print medium. Their sensitive exploration of different techniques and innovative technology has ensured long working relationships with many great artists, including Alex Katz. Lococo has published several catalogs and monographs on the artist, helping establish a strong and competitive market for Katz’s prints.”
2242 Richmond Avenue
Houston, 77098 TX
(713) 520-9988
Get directions