Alex Katz: Repetitions

Alex Katz (b. 1927) transforms the people and places that comprise his two homes—New York City and Lincolnville, Maine—into powerful images that reflect his enchantment with modern life and his dedication to painting. He makes landscapes representing his everyday surroundings, portraits of close friends and family, and genre scenes featuring members of his creative circles. 

This installation of the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz highlights different strategies of repetition in Katz’s art, focusing on four words that describe this defining aspect of his artistic practice: reflection, recurrence, reduplication, and re-creation. Each captures a different, yet overlapping, meaning that emphasizes how repetition—for Katz, and for us—offers a set of creative tools for observing the world and connecting to it intentionally.

Over seventy-plus years, Katz’s bold and rigorous experiments with light, composition, scale, and collaboration have captured his commitment to present-tense experience. These same experiments constitute an expansive record of his intergenerational artistic community.