New York's Guggenheim Museum presents an extremely personal retrospective starting October 21. Alex Katz: Gathering brings together works from eight decades by Alex Katz. In his hometown, visitors relive the flow of life that Katz always tried to preserve in images.
At the proud age of 95, Alex Katz can look back on eight decades of creative work. The figurative painter transformed the ephemeral, the daily flow of life into lasting, visual experiences. In doing so, he combined the energy of Abstract Expressionism with the U.S. vernacular of magazines, billboards and movie screens. His main subjects advanced to include downtown New York, the Maine coast, and the avant-garde scene of the postwar period to the present.
His collected works will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York starting October 21 in the retrospective Alex Katz: Gathering. It brings together Katzꞌ paintings, oil sketches, collages, drawings, prints and free-standing cutout works in the Frank Lloyd Wright Rotunda. Visitors begin their tour with the intimate sketches of New York subway passengers from the late 1940s and end it at the rapturous, immersive landscapes that dominate the last years of Katz's work. The retrospective is special in that it makes the personal connection to Katz palpable. It takes place in the city where Katz spent and worked his entire life. The exhibition, created in close collaboration with the artist, will be on view until February 20, 2023.
It was one of the most moving decades in the history of the United Kingdom: the 1980s, characterized by strikes, protests and AIDS. Photographers documented this period and in some cases became political activists themselves through their images. The exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain opens on November 21 at the Tate Britain in London.
It is in the context of functional architecture in urban spaces that Guido Klumpe finds the motifs that he stages with his camera as the poetry of the profane. His picturesque images unfold an opulent effect with a reduced formal language, showing us the beauty of the moment in the flow of everyday life.
