Noted Artist to Speak at Yale

Painter and printmaker Alex Katz will speak at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., on February 9 at 6:30 p.m.

Hosted by the Yale School of Art, the talk is free and open to the public.

Katz is best known for his luminous, large-scale portraits and landscapes that show the influence of Pop Art. His style, according to Christian Science Monitor’s Kristen Conover, is “sardonic and cool.” She adds, “Alex Katz has such a way with light and capturing sense-impression that the minute you look at one of his landscapes, you say to yourself, ‘I’ve been there. I know that feeling.’”

Art historian Simon Schama notes that Katz is “famous for both the intensely painstaking quality of his preparation, and the dazzling, almost impulsive quality of the painting itself, which he himself compares to musical performance: concentrated virtuosity after lengthy and unsparing rehearsal.”

Born in New York in 1927, Katz studied at the Cooper Union from 1946 to 1949, and from 1949 to 1950 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Katz exhibits widely in solo gallery shows throughout the United States and Europe. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City has organized traveling exhibitions of his work (1974 and 1986) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of his prints in 1988. “Alex Katz Under the Stars: American Landscapes 1951-1995” was organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S. 1 Museum and traveled to four museums, 1996-1998. In 1998, “Alex Katz: Twenty-Five Years of Painting at the Saatchi Collection” was shown in London, England. Solo exhibitions of his work are currently on display in Italy and Germany.