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Legendary American-born painter Alex Katz (b. 1927) is known for painting portraits and landscapes that possess a quality Robert Storr of the Museum of Modern Art defined as the unquantifiable “cool.” Katz first exhibited in New York City in 1954; solo exhibitions have included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Alex Katz has painted landscapes since the beginning of his extraordinary career, frequently revisiting motifs of the seasons. In 2020, he exhibited Trees, a new series of three monumental paintings featuring late autumn trees in Pennsylvania, at the chapel Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome. The subjects of Katz’s landscapes are form, surface, space and light as they appear to him in nature. From this series, Katz selected two paintings to be envisioned as prints using lithography, woodcut and silkscreen techniques. Honoring the majestic presence of the earth’s landscapes, both prints elevate the perspective of the trees to express a reverence for nature and its cyclical processes.
“Tree 8 is a 6-run lithograph and woodcut print with the three initial woodcut runs building the crisp, blue background and defining the tree with sparse limbs to allow the wood grain to be visible throughout the print. The final three lithographic runs of orange, white and black translate the artist’s gestural brushstrokes to generate the highlights and shadows forming the trunk and branches, schoing the reflections of the receding light on a late autumn day.” Institute for Research in Art, University of Florida
