Press Release

ALEX KATZ QUICK LIGHT 2 June – 11 September 2016 Serpentine Gallery (Serpentine Gallery closed all day on 6 July and reopens at 1pm on 7 July)

“It’s the instantaneous light. If you get it right then you get it in the total present tense - that’s what you’re going for, that’s eternity.” (Alex Katz) The Serpentine presents the work of renowned American painter Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York). Coming of age as an artist in 1950s New York, Katz developed his unique approach to contemporary representational painting during the height of Abstract Expressionism. Over the five and a half decades since his first exhibition in 1954, Katz has produced a celebrated body of work, including paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. Establishing himself as a pre-eminent painter of modern life, he was influenced by films, billboard advertising, music, poetry and his close circle of friends and family. His portraits and landscapes are characterised by their flatness of colour and fluidity of line, reinventing both genres within the context of abstract painting and contemporary image-making. The Serpentine exhibition takes landscape as its focus, bringing together Katz’s extraordinarily productive output of recent years alongside select works from the past two decades. Katz’s landscape paintings exemplify his life-long quest to capture the present tense in paint. Regardless of their

scale, Katz describes these paintings as ‘environmental’ in the way in which they envelop the viewer. Defined by temporal qualities of light, times of the day and the changing of the seasons, these paintings respond and relate to the unique context of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. The exhibition will also include a recent series of portraits.

Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries, said: “We are thrilled to be presenting Alex Katz at the Serpentine Gallery this summer and to introduce his extraordinary landscape paintings to a new audience in such a fitting setting during our summer season. Katz’s investigations into perceptions of scale and the effects of light have produced a distinctive body of images that continue to influence generations of artists.” Katz draws parallels between his approach to painting and his interest in poetry, both equally concerned with stripping away unnecessary detail to leave only the essential information. This relationship between language and the painting process is echoed in the work of painter, poet and filmmaker Etel Adnan, showing in parallel at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, whose landscapes are similarly defined by their bold colour and simplified form that is nevertheless rooted in keen observation of the world around her. The summer season at the Serpentine also includes the Serpentine Pavilion designed by Bjarke Ingels and the Summer Houses designed by Kunlé Adeyemi – NLÉ, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan, which opens to the public on 10 June, and the Park Nights series of live events. For press information contact: Miles Evans, milese@serpentinegalleries.org, +44 (0)20 7298 1544 V Ramful, v@serpentinegalleries.org, +44 (0)20 7298 1519 Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR Image Credit: Alex Katz Reflection 7, 2008 Oil on linen, 274.3 x 548.6 cm Courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rome/New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Alex Katz, DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2016 Photograph: Paul Takeuchi Notes to Editors Alex Katz (b. 1927, New York) lives and works in New York and Maine. He graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art, New York in 1949 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine in 1950. Selected solo exhibitions include: The High Museum, Atlanta; Guggenheim, Bilbao (2015–6); Tate St Ives; Turner Contemporary, Margate (both 2012); The National Portrait Gallery, London (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Albertina, Vienna (2010); Saatchi Gallery, London (1998); P.S.1 / Institute for Contemporary Art, New York (1997-8); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia (1996); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1995); Brooklyn Musuem (1988); Vancouver Art Museum (1977).

ALEX KATZ QUICK LIGHT SERPENTINE GALLERY 2 JUNE – 11 SEPTEMBER 2016 Unless otherwise stated works are courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rome/New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg SOUTH GALLERY

Ada, 2015 Oil on linen 152.4 x 304.8 cm (60 x 120 inches) Courtesy Private Collection

Vivien, 2015 Oil on linen 213.4 x 426.7 cm (84 x 168 inches) Maja Hoffmann Collection

Anna, 2015 Oil on linen 121.9 x 289.6 cm (48 x 114 inches) Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg

SMALL WEST GALLERY

January 7PM, 1997 Oil on linen 243.8 x 304.8 cm (96 x 120 inches) Private Collection Courtesy Galería Javier López & Fer Francés, Madrid

  

 

 

 

White Impatiens 2, 2012 Oil on linen 152.4 x 213.4 cm (60 x 84 inches)  

WEST GALLERY

Untitled Cityscape 4, 2014 Oil on linen 213.4 x 152.4 cm (84 x 60 inches)

Nicole, 2015 Oil on linen 152.4 x 304.8 cm (60 x 120 inches)

Reflection 7, 2008 Oil on linen 274.3 x 548.6 cm (108 x 216 inches)  

         

West 1, 1998 Oil on linen 243.8 x 487.7 cm (96 x 192 inches)

NORTH GALLERY

  

City Landscape, 1995 Oil on linen 304.8 x 609.6 cm (120 x 240 inches) Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection

 

Black Brook 18, 2014 Oil on linen 243.8 x 304.8 cm (96 x 120 inches)  

 

Cross Light 3, 2015 Oil on linen 342.9 x 457.2 cm (135 x 180 inches) Maja Hoffmann Collection   

4 pm, 2014 Oil on linen 365.8 x 274.3 cm (144 x 108 inches) The Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman

EAST GALLERY

Red House 1, 2015 Oil on linen 182.9 x 182.9 cm (72 x 72 inches) Albertina, Vienna – Batliner Collection Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg

Fog, 2014 Oil on linen 274.3 x 548.6 cm (108 x 216 inches)

Christy, 2015 Oil on linen 182.9 x 365.8 cm (72 x 144 inches)

Emma, 2015 Oil on linen 213.7 x 426.7 cm (84 x 168 inches) Private Collection Courtesy Jamie McCourt SMALL EAST GALLERY

Red House 3, 2013 Oil on linen 203.2 x 213.4 cm (80 x 84 inches)

Snow Scene 3, 2014 Oil on linen 213.4 x 274.3 cm (84 x 108 inches) Courtesy Rodrigo & Ninfa Ripstein Collection

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H A NS U LR ICH OBR IST Was there an epiphany that brought you to art?

A LEX K AT Z No, it’s something I always liked to do. I painted and I just liked doing it.

I painted all over my parent’s walls [laughs]. I drew all over the staircase and they thought it was OK. They left it there for years.

HUO So it wasn’t an encounter with an artwork that changed everything? It was something that was always present.

A K It was very gradual. I was intimidated by art because it was presented to me as something that geniuses did. I had very little talent, but I liked doing it. I didn’t think of becoming a serious artist until after I’d finished art school. Then I said, ‘Let’s go for it!’

HUO And was that at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York?

A K Yes, it was. Cooper Union was one of the few modern art schools in the United States.

HUO You once called it a Bauhaus of provincial modern art. Did you have heroes or heroines at that time?

A K No, not in the school. I liked Cézanne. By the time I got out of Cooper, I could appreciate Matisse and Picasso and Miró and so the teachers’ scene wasn’t where I wanted to go.

HUO You once said in an interview that in 1950, when you were at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, you had a ‘plein-air moment’. There’s a return to pleinair right now, so I’m curious about your early plein-air work.

A K Well, for me it was a way of getting into the unconscious, because I didn’t have to think things through like I was doing with modern art. It was in the air. Jackson Pollock was working on the unconscious. I didn’t know Pollock when I started,

A conversationAlexKatz&HansUlrichObrist,withVincentKatz

but it was a way of getting into something more open. If you think about it, in the late 1940s and 50s, most paintings had black lines enclosing them – you know, Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Mondrian: the black line. And then in Cubism everything was in planes. I started to paint and I just forgot everything and then the lessons were all absorbed unconsciously. I found out that things were going great and I wasn’t even thinking about it, and that was the start. There was a lot of connection, total connection.

HUO And would that be the moment where your catalogueraisonnéstarts?

A K Well the paintings that I was doing then weren’t very good! When I came back to the city I was comparing the art I did at Cooper to the plein-air work, and one was not as bad or as good as the other, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I knew what I wanted to do, it was very clear: I wanted to make a modern realistic painting. The whole idea of what was considered realistic looked like old-fashioned painting but I wanted to do something new. It took me seven or eight years to get to something that people liked – to get an audience.

HUO And to come back to the catalogue raisonné, what is the number one?

A K Oh, I don’t know. What would you say, Vincent?

V I NCEN T K AT Z The date that’s in my mind is around 1951. For example, TwoBoys(1951).

A K OK … is that it? [laughs]

V K And a couple of others from that era.

A K I painted with white grounds in the very early 1950s because I was trying to put as little paint on the canvas as possible. There’s a tree painting titled WinterScene(1951–2) in the Museum of Modern Art that’s just all-white gesso with black lines on it.

V K It’s important to think of the exhibitions that you saw in 1950 and 51.

A K Oh yes. New York, you have to understand, was a provincial town in the 1940s, but there was the Berlin loan exhibition, there was a great Rembrandt exhibition, and there was an Austrian exhibition. The National Museum in Austria lent paintings, including a great Velázquez.

HUO Ah, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

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WinterScene, 1951–2

A K Yes, they sent the loan. Prior to that, I’d read books and they’d say what a great painter Velázquez is, and I’d seen a couple of Velázquez works in print, but they didn’t look so hot.

HUO So that was very important for you?

A K Yes, very important. You really saw what a great painting is.

HUO And Rembrandt also particularly struck you?

A K Well they had a Rembrandt exhibition at Wildenstein gallery showing many of his masterpieces. My appreciation of Rembrandt is technical. I really find the humanist stuff tasteless, but the technical skill was fantastic to me.

HUO At that time Abstract Expressionism was the only show in town, as you once said – it almost had a monopoly. Was there something of a rebellion against that, for your generation?

A K Yes. On the one hand it was freedom from Europe; we were no longer provincial the minute AE hit. I grasped that, but the Abstract Expressionists all seemed very pompous and had this macho attitude that I found really silly – posturing, posing – they all seemed very fake.

HUO Then your own first exhibition was in 1954 at the Roko Gallery. Can you tell me about this exhibition?

A K Roko Gallery was at the back of a frame shop. There were very few exhibition spaces then. I showed a lot of thinly painted landscapes. Actually, a big part of the art world saw that show and some friends bought three or four paintings, but no one understood them. Frank O’Hara wrote a good review (p. 22); he sort of understood it. Later on he apologised – he thought it should have been a rave – but he gave me a nice review and that was it.

HUO By that time had you already moved on to the more flat, monotone backgrounds?

A K When I first started I did a lot of continuum paintings for a couple of years, but I decided to paint flatter in 1953 or 54. By 1954 I was using flat colour.

HUO And how did you arrive at this idea of the monotone background?

A K I was looking at abstract painting and the colours had light and depth, so I opened it up. The big thing was when I did the figures on a flat ground, and it had to do with the ground having air so the figures could fit legitimately into the ground.

HUO Can we talk about the cut-outs. Didn’t they come about following an invitation to do a play?

A K No, I did the play with Kenneth Koch because he saw the show of the cut-outs.

HUO So it was the other way round. How did you invent the cut-outs?

A K I had a painting of life-sized figures that didn’t work. I got so depressed that I just cut the figures out. I said, ‘They look pretty good’, but then I found the life-size figures weren’t actually big enough, and then I started asking myself, ‘What is life-size?’ So I did it with classical sculpture forms, trying them in different sizes and realised that it’s about perception. I made the portrait of Frank O’Hara seven-eighths life-size.

HUO You once said that you wanted energy to spread beyond the edge of the image, as if it were a human being. Can you tell me about this?

A K Again, it has to do with perception. Energy passes beyond the edges of a person. When you see them dead, you’re always surprised how small they are. When you cut out a photograph, it doesn’t go beyond the edge. My early ones were really

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gestural; I was trying to get the energy beyond the edge. It also has to do with size. The big faces I painted had to do with perceptions of scale, like a movie – the movie is life-size, but the face is actually 20 feet high.

HUO It’s interesting that you mention the movies, because about ten years ago I spent an afternoon in Kraków with the great poet Czesław Miłosz. To my surprise, he talked about cinema, and said that everybody in the twentieth century, whether a writer, a painter, a poet or an architect, was influenced by cinema – it was impossible not to be. I suppose that’s the case for you as well.

A K Oh definitely.

HUO What was its influence?

A K When I finished work, I’d go to a movie, pay and walk in. I didn’t care what the name of the movie was and what part of the movie I walked into. I’d look at the pictures to get away from traditional imagery. You’d see a big head on the side of the screen – a big face and a lot of landscape. I hadn’t seen that in art and so I was influenced by a lot of that imagery from the movies.

HUO And were there any movies in particular?

A K No, I didn’t care, mostly Westerns. I’d just walk in. Of course, if you walked in at the beginning, it’d be a worse movie! Much better to walk in in the middle.

HUO Miłosz also mentioned that, for him, film was monumental. Obviously there’s something very monumental in terms of the scale in your paintings. Is there any connection?

A K Films led to the big faces, and when you’re looking at my big face paintings, it’s like a movie. When you see a movie, the actual size is maybe 20 or 40 feet, but you still relate it to yourself and your scale, and that’s what I was trying to do. Some monumental things, like Buddhas and Egyptian statues, are supposed to be big and not relate to your scale. So the problem was to take something really big and make it relate to you. The flower paintings were enormous blow-ups, but it took me about six months to get one to work on a big scale and seem like it was on your scale. Before that they seemed gargantuan. I was painting flowers and they all looked like Mount Everest, and all of a sudden I got one to work. And then they all worked after that and I don’t know what the difference was.

HUO What role does chance play in this process?

FrankO’Hara, 1959–60

A K Yes, chance is a big thing in painting. Sometimes it doesn’t make any difference what colour I use. There’s an element of chance all the time; you just relax and hope it works out.

HUO You said that with these monumental paintings you wanted to have something that was contained and aggressive at the same time.

A K Well, I didn’t like the big gestural thing of de Kooning, so in that way it was contained, but I wanted to be able to knock his work off the wall! My paintings don’t look aggressive when you’re near them, but if you put them next to other people’s paintings, you’ll see they’re very aggressive. And it has to do with the light, which is quick. Impressionist light is slow, de Kooning and Pollock’s light was quick, and John Singer Sargent’s light is very quick. I wanted that quick light so the painting comes out really fast at you.

HUO Yes, you said that you wanted to – I love this sentence – to burn an image into someone’s head.

A K Absolutely. I want to make paintings that you’re forced to remember.

HUO It’s similar to Federico García Lorca, who said a great poem is like a corkscrew into your brain.

A K Yes, I don’t want to make decoration.

HUO You often talk about painting fast: to paint fast is to start with one side of your mind, let go, and then let the other side do it.

A K That started with painting enpleinair. And then I painted from photographs a lot in the early 1950s, and it was the same idea – when you paint fast you don’t think, your unconscious does it, and all your lessons are absorbed by your unconscious. I did three years of antique drawing in high school and I went through three years at Cooper Union with Cubism, with planes and stuff, and it gets absorbed so you don’t have to think, you just start working. And I work automatically, and someone says, ‘Oh, what great space.’ I’ve never thought about space, I’ve just thought about getting the paint on the canvas.

HUO So you’re absorbed, but also the viewer can become absorbed, particularly in your very big landscape paintings.

A K Well that’s the idea. I was walking in Maine in winter and I saw some snow against a tree, which gave me the idea of making a landscape that was

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‘environmental’, where in other words, you’re in the landscape. I wanted a landscape that really enveloped you. I developed the idea after I had the big retrospective in the Whitney in 1986. After that I said, ‘I’m not just going to continue to paint masterpieces’, and so I got involved in this environmental landscape. There have to be precedents. I think Gustave Courbet did a couple of really big landscapes that are almost that.

HUO You’ve said several times in previous interviews that light holds it all together, so what is light?

A K Light is the initial flash of what you see; that’s what I’m after. People ask me about the colours, but the colours are irrelevant. I can change the colours as long as I’ve got the light. People think that my colours are really specific but they’re not because I’m looking for an overall light.

HUO So you don’t have a favourite colour?

A K No, and I don’t care about it. I say, ‘Well the background is grey but to get the light right I have to transpose it.’

HUO That’s very interesting because in the twentieth century many artists, like Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, had colour theories. So you don’t have a colour theory?

A K No, those colour theories are very boring. They’re pedantic, dogmatic.

HUO What’s the biggest painting you’ve ever made?

A K The Times Square billboard in 1977, which was 250 feet long. I always had a dream of being able to put a painting up in Times Square next to the billboards and have it hold up. Times Square was very dead at that point and to liven it up a city group gave billboards to artists. And I was already painting big and this woman came over and said, ‘Would you like to paint a billboard in Times Square?’ I tried to be cool and said, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting’, but I was dying to do it! The billboard I liked was 250 feet long and 20 feet high, and it went round a corner and had a 60-foot tower on it. I thought I’d like to do pretty girls, like the Elgin Marbles frieze, with all that motion and the horses. It took me about three months to make and by that time the agency that was organising it had folded. We needed money to complete it, so I cut up the maquettes and we sold them. We got a house painter to paint the billboard and it was up for about five years. Then it chipped and it was remade.

HUO How did you decide what to do there? Because it’s such a public painting.

A K Pretty girls! You can’t go wrong with pretty girls!

V K But did you think about the other billboards facing them?

A K No, I didn’t think about them at all. The guy had painted 20-foot heads, wet-on-wet, and we were wondering whether the secondary tones held, so I’d come in from Maine and we’d go on the street and look at it and we decided it would hold. Later, some guy in an airplane said, ‘What’s my ex-wife doing at Times Square?’ The imagery had carried up to an airplane, and it was really strong!

HUO And so that was the biggest painting. What’s the smallest you’ve ever done?

A K I did a cut-out horse, and I cut out a dog this big [gestures].

HUO Wow, that’s like a microgram.

A K And the collages are very tiny. I don’t know how I did them.

HUO In the historic avant-garde there were a lot of links to poetry, which has played a very important role for you for several decades. How did your interest start?

A K I always liked poetry. In the 1950s, Johnny Myers was publishing poets, and Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch were writing poetry, and I just seemed to get it. It’s the same thing as with the scale – one day you don’t get it and the next day you do and I sort of got poetry. Once I got the new poetry then I could get more interested in old poetry. But I always liked poetry when I was in college; even when I was in the navy I used to read it but I never got into the modern things. I was there when John Ashbery returned from Paris and he changed the whole poetry world. He did a reading in the Living Theatre Palace in around 1963. It was cool.

Up until then Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg were very hot. Ashbery came in a business suit with a shirt and a tie. I remember he had a very sharp suit and no pocket for the handkerchief, and he had a very neat haircut and he read in a monotone. So he was like Stan Getz but six, seven, or eight years later. It was a current. Styling in art is a big current that no one controls and it goes across all the arts. In the early 1950s you had bebop, William Faulkner and Pollock and they were all doing the same thing.

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HUO Without knowing about each other?

A K No. I mean, de Kooning found Faulkner, but basically it was just a current in the air. And I think the cool current in the early 1950s was Stan Getz and those guys, and then all of a sudden there was no more hot jazz. Bebop was cool and Ashbery was the cool poet.

HUO So it was the next step after the Beat Generation?

A K Yes, the Beat Generation was obsolete. It was gone. The cool came in and they were out. The clothes went from zoot suits to Ivy League with thin lapels.

HUO So if you had to name one living poet that is closest to you, would you say Ashbery?

A K Ashbery was the great stylist of the 1960s. Jimmy Schuyler was the most refined, Kenneth Koch has wonderful energy, but Frank O’Hara was extending himself emotionally all the time. He’s my all-time greatest poet.

HUO How did you meet him?

A K He reviewed my first show. He said there was an ‘oriental calm’ to the work and I thought it was very hot; it made me revisit what I was doing. I became friends with Jane Freilicher, who had soirées, and I met Frank there. In the late 1950s he came to my studio; he actually bought two of my works. He’d never bought from any other painter, and we became friends.

HUO And did you do books with him? Because with Ashbery you did.

A K I did several books with Ashbery. But no, I never did a book with Frank. He died so young. He had an emotional and intellectual investment in a lot of people and I was lucky to be one of them.

HUO He said once, ‘I’m ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile.’ 1

A K [Laughs] That’s a great line. That’s sort of like Edwin Denby. Didn’t he say something like that?

V K ‘For with regret I leave the lovely world men made. Despite their bad character, their art is mild.’ 2 That was Denby. He was an important person for you.

HUO Can you talk about him?

A K I saw him almost every day for nearly ten years. We were really close. I had a street education and he had a classical education.

HUO You were learning from each other.

A K Yes. It was amazing because he was interested, and his classical education was fantastic, but he didn’t get a lot of the ‘street’ stuff.

V K He was a great dance critic and you took him to Afro-Cuban dances.

Alex Katz in his Maine studio, 2015

2 Edwin Denby. ‘Ciampino: Envoi’ in MediterraneanCities, 1956

1 Frank O’Hara, Naphtha, 1959

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A K Oh yes, it was very funny. We were dancing at the Palladium, which was Afro-Cuban. I ran into Rudy Burckhardt on the street. I’d seen Rudy’s movies and they were fantastic, so I introduced myself to him. He lived near me and he came up to the studio. He was very excited about the works and he said, ‘Well, I’ll photograph your work and you give me a painting.’ And I said, ‘Great, because I have no money.’ And then I said, ‘I’m going dancing on Saturday night, do you want to come along?’ So he came along with Denby, but they didn’t dance, they just stood there. Then Denby starts asking me questions about the dances, so I explained, ‘Well the mambo is different from the cha cha cha,’ and told him what the rhythms are. Then I started to ask, ‘What do you do?’ and he passed himself off as a half-assed poet! So I went over to see him and we hit it off.

HUO So that was the beginning. Did you do books with him?

A K No. I made a lot of portraits of him but no books. He wasn’t publishing much.

HUO Can you tell me about the books with Ashbery?

A K I thought of doing parallel illustrations – in other words, not literal illustrations, work that felt like what he was doing. So I took photographs of my own work and made them into grisailles. And I finished a whole bunch of them. I gave them to him and he just put them where he thought they should be and it worked out really well. And we did the second book the same. How many books have we done with him, just two?

V K You did Fragmentin 1969 and you did ComaBerenicesin 2005.

A K The later one we did photogravure, the same idea. I did two with Kenneth Koch as well, and a play with Jimmy Schuyler, a great big painting titled after the play ShoppingandWaiting(1953).

HUO In an interview with Richard Prince, you said that you’re a dilettante in poetry – do you write your own poetry?

A K No, no, no, no, no!

HUO But do you write at all?

A K I’ve written some small statements, that’s about it though.

HUO And do you have unrealised projects?

A K No, I don’t think so. There are some painting ideas I have to get to when I’ve finished with my current body of work. For example, I saw a photo on the back of a cornflake box of a girl with a towel over her head that was great. I’ll try that.

HUO Dan Graham always says that we can only understand an artist if we also understand what kind of music he listens to. You said once that you drifted from jazz to Sonny Rollins, who for you is the last jazz musician, and after that it was over with music, and you then went into poetry.

A K We were really into music and then we started watching live poetry a lot more. The jazz got cerebral in about 1967/8, with Cecil Taylor. I like more visceral music.

HUO And at the moment do you listen to music when you work?

A K Yes, I listen to music. It varies what I’m listening to. Sometimes I listen to Bach’s StMatthewPassionfor a long time, and I’ll listen to German lieder, and I’m listening to a lot of Sonny Rollins this summer. And the video of me painting has Meredith Monk singing [FiveHours, 1996].

HUO Who did this video?

V K My wife, Vivien Bittencourt, and I. It focuses on the process of the painting one work, filmed in the studio in 1996; there’s no talking at all. The sound is of one of the singers that he was listening to that day. Then we took some more of her music and made up the whole soundtrack. He had also painted and made a print of Meredith Monk.

HUO One thing we haven’t spoken about yet is the studio. There are your portraits, your landscapes, your still lifes, and I was wondering how the process works – do you work on all these things in parallel or one at a time?

A K I always work on a lot of things at once. I work in series of paintings and there can be two going on at the same time but the large paintings I don’t do simultaneously. I do one painting, then a few days later I’ll do another. The studies might be going on simultaneously for different works, drawings of some of these.

HUO But all of these parallel realities continue – you continue to do landscapes and you obviously continue to do portraits.

A K Yes, I went into flowers and I hadn’t been doing many landscapes, and all of a sudden at the end of the summer I had an urge to paint a house in a landscape. The paint was going on great, so I just followed the paint. I got out of the painting

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IslesboroFerrySlip, 1975

in two and a half hours, and it looked OK. And then Ada liked it a lot and then Rob Storr came over and thought it was terrific. It means that I opened a new door, so I’ll be back in landscapes.

HUO That’s exciting!

A K It’s a little house on a lake. It’s almost what they call a camp, a weekend place that someone lives in full time. The painting worked out and I don’t understand it and that means I’m going to have to keep doing that. The flowers have gone on much longer than I thought – they just keep evolving.

HUO You said that there are different steps – you sketch and then you make the bigger drawing. Can you explain the steps?

A K The initial thing is a sketch, just like I did in high school, except I know what I’m doing now a little better. The first step is unconscious, then you try to figure out what you like about it and what you don’t. If the imagery is new, sometimes I make six or seven sketches, but other times it’s just one or two sketches, and then I start to think what size I can make the painting. Sometimes you do it at 4 feet and then 6 feet and then you say, ‘I bet this would look good at 12 feet.’ And then you say, ‘Do you think I can make it at 20 feet?’ That’s the way it goes.

HUO Then at some moment it stops.

A K I don’t go beyond 20 feet.

HUO I suppose you have live models who come to the studio or you work outside in the landscape but are there also moments when it’s done photographically?

A K I took photographs for a very short period of time. We went to the same beach for forty years. I always wanted to paint the whole beach but I could never figure out how to do it. I started to notice that there are gestures of people on the beach that are never repeated. And then in 2000 I asked Vivien for a camera that a 14-year-old could use. I went down to the beach and I kept taking random shots and I started putting them together. Then it took about two or three years. I really got it down, and I did a great big painting of people walking on the beach, and after that I had no interest in photography whatsoever.

HUO The camera disappeared again.

A K It disappeared yes. I have used photos before, like for IslesboroFerry Slip (1975). It came from a photo of Vincent and a friend in Mont Saint-Michel. I used the image of Vincent and swapped in another friend and it made it Islesboroin Maine. So photos have been an inspiration, as have movie stills and movies. I saw a Russian movie and there were a lot of people walking outdoors in the snow, and out of that I got all those paintings of Ada outdoors in the snow.

HUO Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favourite poets, wrote this lovely little book of advice to a young poet. I was wondering what, today, would be your advice to a young painter?

A K Well, I think if you want to be a painter, you paint six hours a day, six days a week, and then after four or five years see whether you still like it!

Conversation took place in London, 2012

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You may spot a house in the distance. Then you might see a face up close. In some moments, space seems to vanish and who or what is before you is all there is. A moment later, your eyes might travel again, as far as they can and back, attempting to grasp where you are amidst your surroundings. Far may not be that far when the building right across the street blocks your view, or it might be that your gaze finds its way past trees scattered enough to let it see almost to the horizon. Halfway, however, you might find a stream dividing the field in two, so that getting from here to over there will lead to a pair of wet feet. With any move you make, the manner in which you perceive the depth of the world around you can change profoundly. And this is not just something that the muscle in your eyes has to cope with. It affects your whole body and self. At times, reality comes rushing in. Facts hit you flat in the face. There is no depth in a close encounter. Intense moments of love or pain, or when you simply bump your head, tend to have a cartoonish edge to them. Ah! Ouch! Intensity renders life in 2D. At other times, reality pulls back, more things come into view, and as you try to hold on to what is in front of you, it recedes and turns into a memory right before your eyes. This is life in full 3D, a deep space in which what is present and what is held in your memory resonate with one another in the most perplexing way.

The beauty and power of Alex Katz’s paintings lies in the way in which he engages all the different aspects of how we experience depth, both sensually and existentially. He is not afraid to show reality in the key of that joyful flatness that one would associate with Pop art. The outlines of a face may be rendered with a few attentively traced lines on and around a patch of skin tones, contrasting mildly with the warm glow of the monochrome backdrop from which it is separated by a wave of hair. This is how it is when the face of the person before you fills your field of vision, and the horizon of your senses is coloured by the immediate bodily presence of another living being. Yet Katz won’t remain solely in this mode. He will equally enter all other dimensions available to painting. Beyond what is given in the immediate foreground, he may carefully hint at the possibilities of space widening in the middle ground, so as to let a landscape, a forest, a brook appear. At other times this space may match that between your window and the building opposite and so just be wide enough for you to catch a glimpse of clouds in the night sky above the roofs, illuminated by the street lights below. Like a lung that fills with air and empties itself out between breaths, the middle ground in some of Katz’s works appears deep at one moment, blank the next. The way he paints the intervals between flowers, stems and petals, trees, trunks and leaves, gives you a sense of how vast the space between little things can become when beheld by

Lived DepthJanVerwoert

a microscopic gaze, but also of how this depth disappears and looks like an opaque blotch once you step back from the canvas. This is the world as we live it, with eyes in motion and a mind that reaches out into space or homes in on something and holds it very close, seeking the soul in this material world.

Post-war debates around colour-field painting in New York coined terms powerful enough to frame the work for years to come. The fact that a canvas is literally a flat surface was held to be the truth of the medium. Measured against this standard, the creation of visual depth would rate as an attempt to trick viewers into seeing a third dimension where in fact there is none. Faced with the choice between truth or trickery, what would a progressive painter do but side with facts over fiction? Yet why should truth reside in bare fact, while depth must remain pure illusion? How listless would life be if that were so? In this light, the philosophical edge of Katz’s paintings could be seen to lie in how he persists in probing the materiality of the medium, while freeing this materialist approach from literal-mindedness. His concise delivery and attention to each mark on the canvas express his affinity to a basic critical intuition: if you want to show what you see, keep it simple, apply Occam’s razor, and scrape away false embellishments. But Katz doesn’t boil things down just for the sake of it, as a blind reductionist would. Instead, he reintroduces the possibility of seeing depth in painting based on a sense of appreciation for the many dimensions of lived everyday experience. As Spinoza contended, there is something deeply soulful in the manner in which the material world unfolds in its many modalities. A face has the potential to become a landscape. Life fills with memories in a glimpse of an eye. Things are what they are. But how can we ever be sure, as Spinoza asked, that we have fully grasped the potential of their being? This is not so much a doubt as a declaration of love for the depth of what touches you in life. That love is there in every mark and colour that Katz puts on the canvas. It is the calm power with which his paintings radiate.

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At the Stroke of Katz, Sharp JohnGodfrey

I know air when I don’t see itAfter it evacuates, confronted by lightLight makes colours of air well-acquaintedA single look and regard is completeMutable constituents, only once, atsay, ‘the 4 p.m. of the soul’

Is black light hot, reflection cold?Light is a locked-on worldOne does not ‘look at’ lightOne does not ‘look up to’ lightCan one even think lightdoes not make the world ‘ours’?Light is real because its degreesbelong only to usBlack Brook light you can read by

Fog is light’s most intimate propositionBackground is the middle earth of lightIs it a boundless guayaba sky?Wall of the universe?Time without portfolio?

Daylight strokes on, night light stripsSky is a has-been light out of the framea survival game within itAir eats light where birdies flybut the Katz eye is highhanded whenlight is becoming to matterNight is light neat, reflection on the sideBasic black has no modestyReflections: Rorschachs of light

Skin is the unstable home among lightsLight comes from the outside of skinIs a woman a vessel of lit air?Lightly touch, all-over at oncetransitional without detailThis light does not caress or desireIt’s autonomous and demanding

Makes in-between lightincubate a cheek

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Talking about KatzMarleneDumas&JanAndriesse

MARLENE DUMA S When we met in the early 1980s, you liked Katz and I didn’t really like Katz – the

work, that is. Europe wasn’t a very Katz-friendly place at that time. In Holland, no museums showed Katz. And you have to see Katz to get Katz. Without the colour and the scale, it ain’t Katz.

JAN ANDRIESSE The first book you ever gave me was MonasteriesoftheWorld and the second was

a catalogue of Alex Katz. In it you wrote: ‘Some-body has to have this.’

MD The first sentence you underlined was a quote by Katz himself: ‘I’m still involved with light – an absolute present-tense light …’ You taught me to see the light and radiance of Katz, where I’d only seen it as hard, like plastic but not like Pop art, which is a different kind of nice, even though it’s hard-edged too.

JA You see, this is part of the misunderstanding: his edges aren’t hard. Because he

works wet in wet, the edges are soft.

MD Oops!

JA Some things are simple. My Katz is: it’s 1974. I’m twenty-four years old, living in Montreal, trying to make a painting. It’s winter. Winters in Canada are cold and dark and very, very long. I went into a gallery – no-one had whispered a thing – and there out of the blue was this large painting of a longhaired dog and a longhaired girl. Two monumental pyramids. Along the upper edge were two green horizontal rectangles evoking grass, a window. The dog had one all-seeing eye and the paint was fresh and immediate and the light was amazingly clear and even. Nothing can take away that encounter.

MD You told me how nice it was that this work said ‘I love my wife, my son, my dog ….’

JA The second encounter was very different, but just as wonderful: the colossal frieze on Times Square in NYC, filled with beautiful portraits of women. He was inspired by billboards. Now he painted on a billboard, but it wasn’t a billboard at all. It was a painting – a painting that took on the sleaze and the visual overload of 42nd Street with ease. NineWomen, 1977, mural, Times Square, New York

MD I never got to see that, but by now I have seen many a beautiful Katz. Although I still wonder if these secular encounters consisting of his immaculately made models are really portraits.

JA Of course they are.

MD I have to admit that when I saw the exhibition, AlexKatzPaintsAda in 2006 in the Jewish Museum in New York, I was very moved. She, his Nefertiti, his Egyptian Queen, ain’t just anybody. Lately, I’ve realised that my obsession with the fall of man isn’t the only way to go about things. Not that the neutrality of Katz’s images shows indifference. It is aggressive. Yes, Katz is clean, but clean like the Mafia at a baptism.

Conversation took place in Amsterdam, 2016