Alex Katz New York, USA, b. 1927

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, and lives and works in New York. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

He developed his own approach to representational painting at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Over the seven decades since his first exhibition in 1954, he has produced a celebrated body of work, including paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. A pre-eminent painter of modern life, he draws inspiration from films, billboard advertising, music, poetry and his close circle of friends and family. Primarily working from life, he produces images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed strokes and planes of flat colour. His great admiration for Henri Matisse's sense of colour, composition and economy of means is evident in Katz's work, as is his interest in the American vernacular tradition.

Katz has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions since 1951, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1986); the National Portrait Gallery, London (2010); the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (2019); and a career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022). Recent solo shows include the Albertina, Vienna (2023); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2024); and Kunsthalle Tübingen (2026). His work is held in more than 100 public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate and the Berardo Collection in Portugal, and the Colby College Museum of Art has a dedicated wing for his work.