By Sarah Douglas 9/13/11 7:56pm

Art

9 Photos

Alex Katz and Gavin Brown at an Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at the Metropolitan Opera earlier this year.

When Gavin Brown Met Alex Katz: An Artist's New Show Is At An Unexpected Venue

When you’re sitting inside Alex Katz’s studio, a spacious, light-filled fifth-floor loft on West Broadway, it’s easy to forget the bustling streets below.

What you might expect to read next is that the 84-year-old painter, whose bald pate and sinewy build lend him a monk-like aspect, who has lived and worked in this space since 1968, when Soho was an industrial slum—before the artists arrived, before the galleries moved in, and before retail forced them all out—leads an isolated life, toiling away at his canvases, far above the fray, immune to any sense of competition.

Not so. Read More

By Mario Naves 5/29/06 12:00am

Petlin’s Ambiguous Agitprop Pushes Dialogue, Not Dogma

The centerpiece of Irving Petlin’s exhibition of paintings and drawings at Kent Gallery is The Entry of Christ into Washington (2005), a tripartite canvas of about five by 12 feet. It’s an homage, of sorts, to Belgian painter James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, one of the more quizzical masterpieces of early modernist Read More

By Mario Naves 5/29/06 12:00am

Petlin’s Ambiguous Agitprop Pushes Dialogue, Not Dogma

The centerpiece of Irving Petlin’s exhibition of paintings and drawings at Kent Gallery is The Entry of Christ into Washington (2005), a tripartite canvas of about five by 12 feet. It’s an homage, of sorts, to Belgian painter James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, one of the more quizzical masterpieces of early modernist Read More

By Hilton Kramer 7/18/05 12:00am

Two Wonderful Shows: Painter Alex Katz Having Big Summer

For
the American painter Alex Katz (born 1927), this has been a remarkable summer.
In June, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Me., organized a
comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s diminutive collages (over 70 in
number), most of them dating from the 1950′s; and in July, the Farnsworth Art
Read More

By Hilton Kramer 7/18/05 12:00am

Two Wonderful Shows: Painter Alex Katz Having Big Summer

For the American painter Alex Katz (born 1927), this has been a remarkable summer. In June, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Me., organized a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s diminutive collages (over 70 in number), most of them dating from the 1950′s; and in July, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Me., Read More

By Mario Naves 10/25/04 12:00am

William Hudders’ Keen Eye Keeps Painterly Priorities In Place

Dragging Alex Katz into a review of William Hudders is unfair. It’s unfair to Mr. Hudders, whose recent paintings are on view at the Tatistcheff Gallery, but Mr. Katz can only benefit from the association. Both men have similar approaches to painting, tight-lipped and laconic. Both Mr. Katz and Mr. Hudders abbreviate observed phenomenon with Read More

By Hilton Kramer 9/27/04 12:00am

Alex Katz’s Attack Of Nine-Foot Women Cheerfully Grotesque

It has been said of the oversize exhibition spaces which have now become a standard feature of Chelsea art galleries that the scale of the architecture is often more impressive than the art in the shows. That, certainly, has often been my experience in my sojourns into the wide-open spaces of Chelsea. Only the painters—and Read More

By Hilton Kramer 4/12/04 12:00am

Painter Freilicher Has Skyscrapers Bow To Dancing Flowers

Cloudy skylines and vivid floral bouquets, still-lifes and landscapes, nasturtiums and petunias lording it over Manhattan’s imposing cityscape, the rectilinear cityscape itself dissolved into a phantom Cubist still-life-these are some of the suggestive incongruities to be savored in Jane Freilicher’s new paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Brilliantly rendered floral color commands the foreground Read More

By Mario Naves 11/10/03 12:00am

Conduits for Reverie: Puzzling, Risky Paintings

The horrors of 9/11 are not the explicit subject of Susanna Coffey’s paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though scenes of a city under siege do serve as the backdrop for her continuing exploration of self-portraiture. The events of that day have been transformed in her art into something else-but what that something else Read More

By Mario Naves 11/10/03 12:00am

Currently Hanging

Conduits for Reverie:

Puzzling, Risky Paintings

The horrors of 9/11 are not the explicit subject of Susanna Coffey’s paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though scenes of a city under siege do serve as the backdrop for her continuing exploration of self-portraiture. The events of that day have been transformed in her art Read More