GRAY

Alex Katz: Autumn

In his tenth solo exhibition at GRAY, Alex Katz debuts Autumn, a suite of new landscape paintings. Across eleven monumentally scaled canvases, Katz depicts the vibrant foliage, sweeping fields, and windblown trees of the changing season. The paintings are alongside a series of sixteen new portraits on paper. Alex Katz: Autumn opens at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue) with a public reception on Friday, September 8, from 5-7 PM CT, and will be on view through October 28, 2023.

Alex Katz has painted figures and landscapes in equal measure throughout his career. Expressed at great scale and in vivid color, the paintings exhibited in Autumn range in size from the smallest four-by-five foot canvas to panoramic compositions measuring as wide as fourteen feet. “I started to think about the environmental landscapes [as] being really an environment that wraps around you,” stated Katz in an interview. "There is no narrative. You"re dealing with perception.”

Created between 2022 and 2023 and based on the changing colors of the New York season, Katz’s Autumn series relies on a bright fall palette, while other paintings in the exhibition, from the related series Field'sEnd and Tree Top, present quieter responses to the landscape in muted greens, yellows, and grays.Alongside his landscapes, Katz presents a group of sixteen unique felt-tip ink portraits on paper. Each drawing possesses an economy of line and is titled after its sitter – Vivien, Niki, Levi, Isaac, Vincent, and others– in reference to the friends, family members, poets, dancers, and artists most central to the artist"s life.

Alex Katz: Autumn is the artist’s first exhibition of large-scale landscapes at GRAY since 2018, and follows his lauded career retrospective, Gathering, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the fall of 2022. As Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson described: “[One] might be surprised by the unbound rapture of the landscape paintings that have consumed much of the artist"s still-considerable energy in recent years. But [these works] are in fact the culmination of a lifelong artistic project that aspires to compress everything into ‘a single burst of energy… to paint it wide open.’”

Opening September 8, Closing October 28.

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Gallery Hours

Friday: 10-5

Saturday: 11-5

Sunday: closed

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