Alex Katz
"Four Seasons"

A painter navigating gracefully between the figurative and the abstract, Alex Katz (b.1927, Brooklyn, New York) is renowned for his oeuvre that offers viewers intimate and immediate encounters with everyday scenes distilled into timeless moments. His stark simplicity, formal precision, and emotive depth are achieved through vibrant use of color and iconic imagery, portraying the character of each subject with clarity and impact. Across his illustrious eight-decade career, Katz's influence on American realism and Pop Art persists, continuing to resonate with successive generations of artists worldwide.

In his latest series since 2022, Seasons, Katz embraces spontaneity to capture the fleeting essence of time. Beginning with iPhone snapshots and preliminary sketches, Katz transforms these impressions into expansive canvases. "To get involved in painting a sunset," Katz explains: "you have 15 minutes to make a sketch. And then what you do is make a sketch from what you remember of this moment." By eliminating horizons, his compositions dissolve spatial constraints, immersing viewers in realms of form and chromatic intensity. Often completed within a single morning, the paintings prioritize immediacy over revision, allowing instinct to guide the formal structure. This method reflects Katz’s belief that perception is a temporal act—one best captured through speed, memory, and trust in the eye.

Seasons reflects Katz’s ongoing pursuit to depict the ephemeral interplay of light and atmosphere: from near-automatic sketches that seize the present to canvases that evoke feelings stirred by nature's ever-evolving allure. More than documenting what is seen, the series constructs a poetic record of perception—a series of painterly afterimages that materialize the act of seeing. Each canvas becomes an index of sensory memory, where fleeting visual experiences are pared down, giving ephemeral sensations spatial and emotional permanence. This perceptual logic is rendered with particular force in works like Spring 7 or Autumn 13 (2023), where Katz employs expansive formats—some exceeding two meters in width—to amplify the immediacy of the present. The scale engulfs the viewer while maintaining restraint, intensifying the chromatic field and flattening space until perception itself becomes the subject. Katz’s compositions function as visual haiku—concise, rhythmic meditations that transform the transient into the timeless through reduction, repetition, and atmospheric precision.

"Quick things passing" in Alex Katz's work embodies a profound meditation on transience within painting. His deliberate brushstrokes capture fleeting moments with immediacy and spontaneity, like snapshots suspended in time. Amid a visual culture saturated by speed and reproduction, his paintings invite viewers to dwell, to notice, to remain. In this view, the series does not portray the seasons themselves, but the fleeting sensation of perceiving them—where light, color, and feeling briefly converge. Katz reminds us, through this exhibition, that painting’s strength lies in its stillness—in its ability to distill time into vision.