The Boca Raton Museum of Art is holding an exhibition of small paintings by Alex Katz. If you have not seen it yet, rush it, this is its last month!
Alex Katz: Small Paintings presents a fascinating side of the artist’s practice. The small works present an alternative perspective to the artist’s larger and more familiar works. This exhibition features small-scale paintings juxtaposed with two major large-scale works.
Alex Katz was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, and from 1946 to 1949 studied painting at the Cooper Union. He later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting. Having begun his career at the end of the 1950s, during the height of Abstract Expressionism, Katz developed an original, realist style of painting – a unique and highly stylized aesthetic.
Widely known for his large-scale paintings, Katz began working on a small-scale early in his career as a reaction to the larger works of his predecessors. It wasn’t until 1962, after working for over a decade, when he transitioned to painting on much larger canvases. These small paintings can be thought of as preparatory sketches or studies. While autonomous in their own right, they often serve as a starting point or a draft for his larger works.
