Alex Katz

In 2003, Alex Katz began a series of portraits of young women in winter hats to explore what he called “control painting” in order to achieve greater command over his brush technique. Stephanie, painted a few years later, is a continuation of this journey of control. Here, he displays this new confidence with the open brushwork that characterizes his later paintings.

With an ever-so-slightly askew three-quarter glance, the eponymous subject of Alex Katz’s Stephanie looks warmly towards the viewer with the immediacy of a moment of recognition. According to the artist, “eternity exists in the immediate present”: his goal is always to present the “now,” rather than the past or future. As with much of Katz’s oeuvre, Stephanie acts not as an expression of who someone was, but how they are in a specific, transient moment. The artist’s portraits are layered, gradually revealing the whole person underneath the surface from faces that may at first seem enigmatic and sphinxlike. Like a film still in its scale and framing, Stephanie is a fleeting, cinematic moment of luminescence that invites intimacy.

Katz’s fascination with light is evident in the glimmering tendrils of the subject’s wind-blown hair and the delicate shading on her face. As such, the artist positions himself in near diametric opposition to one of his influences, Rembrandt van Rijn, in his use of shadow and light, justifying art critic Phyills Derfner description of Katz’s work as “portraits of light.” Furthermore, Stephanie’s wind-blown locks are complemented by a Tiepolo sky-blue background, one often used by Katz. Here, it serves to highlight the subject’s face through its pairing with her sunlit, yellow hair. This balance of artificial line with realistic light represents the familiar world in an inverted way, showcasing Katz at the height of his abilities.

Stephanie’s features are defined by Katz’s distinctive wet-on-wet brushwork, a technique that forces the completion of each work in a single session. While the canvas is covered rapidly, meticulous preparation goes into each of these large works. Initially working from ink or pencil drawings, or small-scale oil studies, Katz then often uses a cartoon that is pinned to the canvas, a Renaissance fresco technique called “pouncing” in which dry pigment is forced through pinholes in the paper onto the canvas to form an outline. This allows him to maintain perspective while working in superhuman scale. The resulting cropped, larger-than-life countenance is a style Katz has been perfecting since the 1960s.

With hundreds of solo exhibitions and works held in major museums such as the Modern Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and many other and American and international collections, Alex Katz is one of the most significant and well-known living artists.