Alex Katz on display at Mart in Rovereto with The Sweet Life

After more than a decade, Italy returns to host a major exhibition of Alex Katz (New York, 1927), one of the greatest living American artists. In fact, from May 15 to September 18, 2022, the Mart in Rovereto is hosting Alex Katz. The Sweet Life, curated by Denis Isaia, which exhibits large and very large works made in what can be defined as Katz’s season of maturity, between the 1990s and today. Produced by the Mart thanks to the support and with the constant confrontation of the artist and his studio, the exhibition brings together canvases from major Italian and Swiss collections.

The Rovereto exhibition intervenes in what we can define as Katz’s year: in fact, numerous monographic exhibitions dedicated to the artist are being held around the world this year, such as the one at the Guggenheim in New York (from Aug. 16) and the one at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation in Madrid (from June 11), to which are added those scheduled at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London and the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, the painter’s chosen home. Institutions that will host Katz’s work in 2023 include the Albertina in Vienna and the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.

Katz arrives at the threshold of ninety-five years old with a career studded with more than 250 solo and 500 group exhibitions over seventy years. However, although Katz has been active since the 1950s, in Europe awareness of his work, initially reserved for a few, has only steadily increased since the 1990s. In the preceding decades, despite excellent market feedback, his poetics were distant from the research of critics and institutions. Both in the periods in which painting was looked upon with more distrust (1970s and 1990s) and in the moments when it was “rehabilitated” (1980s), committed artists, works of denunciation or rupture, political or social engagement, anti-system, and in addition depopulated installation, performance and relational expressions, new media, and contaminations between languages. Katz’s art, refined and strongly consistent with itself, stands in sharp contrast: it does not presuppose action, but contemplation. Distant from “intellectualisms,” she wants to depict life for what it is, in search of beauty and harmony.

To Katz’s current fame in Italy and Europe has undoubtedly also contributed the commitment of two Italian gallery owners: in 1990 in Modena Emilio Mazzoli organized a first exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, while in the immediately following years Monica De Cardenas began to propose Katz with conviction to her collectors, first in Italy and later in Switzerland. A few years later the watershed will be Charles Saatchi ’s exhibition (London, 1998), which represents Katz’s real consecration in Europe. Rising, in addition to popularity, were the quotations for the works, which soon became prohibitive. This makes it difficult to schedule exhibitions in the Bel Paese, which remain very few. In 1999 it was the turn of the exhibition at the Galleria Civica in Trento, desired by the then director Vittoria Coen in close collaboration with De Cadernas, who the following year would also follow the project at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, curated by Angela Vettese. In 2001 came Mazzoli’s second exhibition and eight years later that of MARCA in Catanzaro, then directed by Alberto Fiz, the last major Italian exhibition dedicated to Katz. If at this point Italian exhibitions suffered a setback, in the rest of Europe Katz depopulated. From London to Vienna, via Paris, Hamburg and Dublin, major museums focus on the painting of the now elderly New York painter, whose works become part of the most important public and private collections.

The Mart in Rovereto thus picks up the important baton also to recognize the role of those who were pioneers in this story: Emilio Mazzoli, Alberto Fiz and Monica De Cardenas, who still represents Katz in Italy. Alex Katz. La dolce vita presents in a single path and for the first time a wide selection of the works exhibited in Italy since the 1990s, mainly thanks to the foresight of the two aforementioned galleries. More than 40 large canvases constitute a color itinerary in which the two major genres explored by the artist are represented: portraits and landscapes. Also on display is one of the very rare nudes, as well as some sketches, a drawing and two videos, including an excerpt from a film made by director Ranuccio Sodi for television and never aired.

Often associated with the Pop art movement, Alex Katz reworks references from mass culture, American society, television, advertising, and, in close-ups and shots, cinema. At the same time, he appropriates minimalist principles while stripping them of ideological harshness, dwelling on the more exquisitely formal characters that define collective taste, lifestyle and thus ultimately our relationship to our surroundings. With the apparent lightness of his themes and the clarity of his colorful backgrounds, Katz ends up representing an anomaly in the landscape of great post-World War II American art. Although he cannot be assimilated to any school, his work is nevertheless a happy and original synthesis of the best artistic experiences of the twentieth century. From the outset, he moved away from the dramatic vitalism of the Abstract Expressionism of De Kooning and Pollock while sharing their instinctive approach of painting spread rapidly across the canvas. He espouses the poster approach of Pop Art by working on large canvases but is not interested in the tomato cans, movie stars or comic book heroes so dear to Warhol or Lichtenstein. Finally, as in the abstract painting of pure color (Noland, Rothko), he exploits the expressive power of extended and uniform backgrounds, on which, however, he intervenes by painting portraits and landscapes that belong to his environment of choice: the most chic and cultured New York society. In Katz’s canvases the atmospheres are suspended, serene, beyond the hectic time of work and worries. Katz’s style is dry, linear, precise. In his homes, beach trips, everyday life, portraits and landscapes Katz depicts only what he knows: his New York and beloved Maine, where he spends long periods, his closest loved ones, relatives and friends, and countless times his wife Ada, true and first muse, the protagonist of more than 200 works.

Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Katz lives and works in New York City. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He is best known for painting portraits and landscapes, although he has experimented with other techniques. He has collaborated with poets and writers, designing books and covers, and with choreographers and dancers. In particular, he worked alongside the Paul Taylor Dance Company for 50 years, for which he was set and costume designer. He has measured himself several times with major public art interventions. In his 70-year career he has participated in more than 200 solo exhibitions internationally including those organized by: Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, P.S. 1, The Brooklyn Museum, The Tate Gallery, London, The National Portrait Gallery, London, The Serpentine Gallery, London, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Katz’s works have been acquired by more than 100 public collections around the world, including those of New York’s great museums, The Metropolitan, Whitney, and Museum of Modern Art, and that of the Tate Gallery, London. A room at the Albertina Museum in Vienna is dedicated to her work, as is a wing at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.

The exhibition underscores Katz’s distance from the existentialist philosophies and political and social ambitions of much contemporary art, restoring the disengagement of works that celebrate the poetry of life and of a world made up of affections and places of the heart. Through the paintings that have allowed Italians to become acquainted with Katz, the retrospective reckons with what curator Denis Isaia calls the “moral and design question posed by Katz.” At the Mart “there are no conceptual labyrinths, existential tortuosities or obscure philosophical principles. Life is sweet, if we like it.”

“The stubborn will to represent, without restlessness and disturbances, a golden age, a perfect time in which everything is still, in an eternal spring, in an endless youth,” comments Mart President Vittorio Sgarbi. “Everything is still in Katz, the people and nature. Women are eternally young, life is always happy, souls are imperturbable. Katz is the painter of ataraxia.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Sagep Editori with a text by Vittorio Sgarbi, president of the Mart; an essay by art critic Alberto Fiz and one by exhibition curator Denis Isaia; reproductions of the works; and a selected anthology of poetic and critical contributions chosen by the artist from historical and more recent texts, most of which have never been published in Italy. An interview collected in March 1997 by British art critic and curator David Sylvester completes the work.

The exhibition can be visited during Mart’s opening hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Mondays. Tickets: full 11 euros, reduced 7 euros, free up to 14 years old and people with disabilities. For information see the Mart website.

Alex Katz on display at Mart in Rovereto with The Sweet Life

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