Alex Katz, The Colour of the Seasons

Alex Katz has been painting for almost eighty years, moving through the history of American art in the second half of the 20th century without ever abandoning figuration. Four Seasons, presented in Tokyo by SCAI PIRAMIDE, brings together works from the Seasons series, begun in 2022 and devoted to the changing light and landscape over the course of the year. Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Katz studied at Cooper Union in New York in the late 1940s. While Abstract Expressionism dominated the American art scene, he chose to continue painting figures, landscapes and scenes from everyday life. From the 1960s onwards, he developed the language that would make his work instantly recognisable: flat surfaces, sharp contours, broad areas of colour and images reduced to their essential elements. His painting has often been associated with Pop Art, while maintaining an independent path based on direct observation and the simplification of the image. With Seasons, the artist returns to a subject that runs through much of his work: landscape. The process often begins with photographs taken on an iPhone and rapid sketches, which are subsequently used to create large-scale canvases. Katz works from the memory of what he has just observed and from the need to capture rapidly changing conditions, such as a sunset or a particular intensity of light. Some paintings are completed in the course of a single morning. In works such as Spring 7 and Autumn 13, both from 2023, the horizon disappears and depth is greatly reduced. Vegetation, sky and light become broad fields of colour in compositions that can exceed two metres in width. The same principle characterises Summer 17 from 2023: the landscape remains recognisable, but form and colour acquire an autonomy that brings the image close to abstraction. Four Seasons brings together in a single cycle several elements that have been present in Katz’s painting for decades: rapid execution, simplified forms, large formats and an attention to what changes before the eye. The seasons provide the structure of the series, while light, colour and memory determine the variations from one painting to the next.