Alex Katz: Gathering

The exhibition fills the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and an adjacent Tower Gallery. Encompassing paintings, oil sketches, collages, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works, the show opens with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from his student days in the 1940s and culminates in the rapturous and immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.

Emerging as an artist in the mid-20th century, Katz forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy and distillation of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen. He has turned to his direct surroundings in downtown New York City and coastal Maine as his primary subject matter throughout his career, engaging the traditional painterly subjects of portraiture, genre scenes of everyday life, and landscape.