Katz, Alex

In the work of Alex Katz, his wife Ada appears as a constant muse, and here we find her blue-clad figure pictured twice. By repeating the image and denying the viewer intimate engagement with a single subject, Katz sought to move beyond what he believed had become the exhausted genre of psychologically interior portraits. In keeping with his signature style, Katz placed striking emphasis on the subject’s surface through highly flattened brushwork—which he adopted as an alternative to the then-dominant style of expressionistic and gestural abstraction.