Alex Katz: White Lotus

Katz's recent suite of large-scale portraits are inspired by the characters from Mike White's blockbuster HBO series GRAY presents Alex Katz's newest body of work: White Lotus, a series of 12 large scale paintings. American artist Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Alex Katz's White Lotus paintings began in his Maine studio during the summer of 2023. In this series, Katz looks to photography, television and cinema, especially the Italian filmmakers of the 1970's. Each painting portrays a couple in a different fleeting moment, to achieve what Katz describes as "painting in the present tense."