Kenneth A. Friedman & Co. is pleased to present an exhibition featuring a selection of recent prints and sculpture from one of the most prominent figures in Contemporary Figurative Art.

Alex Katz is renowned for his figurative paintings which examine the nature of representing the three dimensional world on canvas in simplified portraits and landscapes. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Katz attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, and then studied art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME. During the height of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, Katz painted representational works, but in the 1950s, his quick, expressive brushstrokes represented the influence of Ab-Ex artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning on his work. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Katz's attachment to simplified forms and to careful studies of light, flatness and color are particularly evident in his work. His dedication to figuration and his embrace of the two dimensional surface foreshadowed these features in Pop Art in the 1960s.

Katz also worked with collage, printmaking, and set design, increasingly focusing on these media and developing freestanding sculptural collages through the 1970s. Katz later painted large scale landscapes, developing “environments” in his works which intended to engage and immerse the viewer and continues working with natural content in his works today.

Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions worldwide, including the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the National galerie, Berlin; the Museum Brandhorst, Munich in addition to a myriad of other fine art institutions of equal merit. Katz has received several honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives and works in New York and Maine.