Summer, 2024
Alex Katz

This dynamic artwork portrays a vibrant, windy day, capturing the essence of nature in motion. The fluid brushstrokes depict tall trees with slender, dark trunks swaying against a soft, azure sky. Streaks of vivid green and bright yellow dominate the canvas, illustrating leaves caught in a gust, creating a sense of lively chaos. The artist masterfully employs contrasting colors to evoke movement and energy, while the simplistic, almost abstract style focuses attention on the interplay of light and wind. The use of digital medium is evident in its crisp lines and smooth gradient sky, enhancing the modern, energetic feel. This piece stands out for its ability to convey the powerful, transient beauty of nature with minimalistic elegance and bold, expressive strokes.

Summer is a graphic work by American artist Alex Katz. It was produced as a pigment print in 2024. Summer is part of the current Seasons series, which was also on display at MOMA New York last year.

Alex Katz's series of works describes the changing seasons, from the bright colors of spring, summer, and fall to the barren palette of winter. Several artworks titled Tree or Autumn have also been published. These works are part of a new series of more than 100 paintings that Alex Katz has created in his New York studio since 2022. The artist draws inspiration from his immediate surroundings, whether it be a solitary tree he encounters on his way home from the cinema on Houston Street or the lush landscape of Maine, where Alex Katz has spent his summers since 1954. The feeling of color is what I wanted, he says. It is the feeling of seeing.

This stunning print is testament to the artist's ever-evolving approach to interpreting the natural world. He often begins with photos taken with his iPhone and smaller painted sketches, which he then transforms into large-scale compositions. In many cases, Katz removes the horizon, whose absence, combined with the large scale of the paintings, creates an environment with no clear beginning or end. Katz often completes an entire painting in a single morning. Although he repeatedly revisits and revises the theme of the four seasons, he approaches each canvas as a new project. Katz cheerfully describes his process as holding his breath and hoping for the best.

Alex Katz is particularly famous for his figurative paintings: the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he was born in New York in 1927. As a pioneer of Pop Art, he always focused on the essentials and explored simplified forms and contrasting color compositions early on. His art is diverse, but always has beauty as its central theme. The artist can now look back on more than 200 solo and around 500 group exhibitions; his diverse works are part of over 100 collections worldwide. Alex Katz lives and works in New York and Maine.

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019, Phillips auction house in London set a new world record for a painting by American artist Alex Katz. The 1972 painting Blue Umbrella I sold for £3,375,000, or the equivalent of US$4.1 million.

Alex Katz is an American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist who became famous for his figurative paintings. His works are instantly recognizable by their colorful, two-dimensional style, which emerged as a reaction to the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. Although Alex Katz is widely recognized for his role as a precursor to the Pop Art movement, he has avoided being associated with any particular style or movement throughout his career.

Galerie Frank Fluegel has featured the artist Alex Katz in its program from the very beginning and has been pointing out for years that he has long been completely underrated in Europe. Now that he is over 90 years old, his work is increasingly coming into focus.

Like Picasso, Katz has become more and more creative with age and seems unstoppable in his creation of new works.

The previous auction record for one of his paintings is over US$1 million, which is still far below the prices achieved by his American colleagues such as Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol.

Many Alex Katz exhibitions in recent years have been dedicated to his talent. These include the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 2019, exhibitions were held in Munich, Germany, at the Museum Brandhorst; Daegu, Korea, at the Daegu Art Museum; and Paris, France, at the Musée de L'Orangerie. His artworks hang alongside those of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Basquiat, and KAWS in museums worldwide.