SANTA MONICA, CA.- Greenfield Sacks Gallery presents an exhibition of works by celebrated New York artist Alex Katz. The exhibition will include oil paintings and prints from 1992 - 2008 in the genre of landscape and seascape. Unlike Katz’s large-scale paintings, the paintings exhibited are small and intimate in scale, each are 9 x 12 inches. The prints range in size from 29 x 23 1/4 inches to 28 3/4 x 67 3/4 inches.

While Alex Katz is best known as a portrait artist, his landscapes and seascapes are a significant part of his work. In 1949 Katz studied at Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine where he learned to paint directly from life in the plein air tradition developed by the French Impressionists. In the paintings on exhibition Katz uses this technique, creating images of the land and sea around him during his summers in Maine.

In Sunset 2, 2006 Katz paints the Maine light falling below the horizon at twilight, capturing a brief moment in nature. Alex Katz once said, “From photography I can’t get any colors and I can’t get the light I’m interested in, I want to go into areas where no one’s been in terms of time: at twilight, you get ten or fifteen minutes”

The prints included in our exhibition utilize a variety of techniques and formats, including woodcut, linocut, etching, and aquatint. In Forest, 2008, the woodcut medium highlights the natural grains in the wood. In Daytona Beach, 2006 Alex Katz uses five separate images in a series to capture the movement of the crashing waves of the Atlantic.

Alex Katz’s works are well represented in over 100 public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.