Alex Katz portraits

de Sarah Howgate, Sandy Nairne, Barry Schwabsky

Alex Katz (b.1927) is one of the most prominent artists of his generation. Often described as a 'painter's painter', his influence is widely felt with many of today's most successful painters from Peter Doig to Elizabeth Peyton acknowledging their debt to his work. Setting his work in the context of the National Portrait Gallery, London creates a new opportunity to consider Katz's work alongside other portrait painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. Katz's distinctive portraits are informed by his interest in billboards and his familiarity with the process of physical enlargement. His minimal aesthetic, with pristine flat surfaces and economy of line, was developed in the 1950s and was at the time both an anticipation of Pop Art and a reaction to the prevalence of Abstract Expressionism, though he chose to work independently of both movements.