Alex Katz: Gathering

Reviews / Votes

Katz is one of the artists who took the measure of America's brash immediacy and optimism, its muscularity and its sweetness, and also its isolation and melancholy-the essential loneliness that is the result of trying to flourish amid America's unresolvable contradictions-and made out of it complex, open-ended, and generous works of art. -- David Salle * New York Review of Books * Sometimes a small detail in an artwork can change everything, not just in your sense of that one work, but also in how you view a larger exhibition. That happened to me when I studied the catalogue more closely...Something hidden is hinted at for anyone who looks closely. And what this little detail reveals is that sometimes what is right on the surface can change our understanding of the whole. -- David Carrier * Hyperallergic * What this retrospective makes clear though, is that Katz remains in a league of his own, defined by his cool regard for the sentimental distance to be found in his own backyard. Perhaps his greatest legacy will be his insistence, via the very acute speech of his paintings, that a global grandeur can be found there. -- Tom McGlynn * Brooklyn Rail * Katz's paintings leave you buzzing with the pleasures of social life. Reticent about things best left unsaid, they dare instead to be witty, charming and disarmingly heartfelt. Celebrations of social display, they're about the joys of seeing and being seen. -- Sebastian Smee * Washington Post * It shows us talent, determination and individual sensibility being molded into great art and maintaining its momentum over time. This is what a retrospective should do, and Katz's work does this with extraordinary clarity, almost transparency. It should give everyone, especially artists, hope. -- Roberta Smith * The New York Times *