Alex Katz
The sweet life
Exhibition - from sunday 15 may 2022 | to sunday 18 sep 2022
Alex Katz, "Libby", 1991
Alex Katz, "Libby", 1991, oil on canvas, Mart, private collection deposit, © Alex Katz, by SIAE 2022
Alex Katz, "Yellow house", 2001
Alex Katz, "Yellow house", 2001, oil on canvas, 183 x 152 cm, Private collection, © Alex Katz, By SIAE 2022
Alex Katz, "Kirsten in chair", 2006
Alex Katz, "Kirsten in chair", 2006, oil on panel, 30,5 x 40,6 cm, Private collection, Modena
Alex Katz, "Woods", 2004
Alex Katz, "Woods", 2004, oil on canvas, 320 x 610 cm, Private collection, Modena
- When
- from sunday 15 may 2022 | to sunday 18 sep 2022
- Cost
- General admission €11, discount admission €7 (ticket valid for all current exhibitions)
- Credits
- From an idea by Vittorio Sgarbi. Curated by Denis Isaia
- Where
- Mart Rovereto
- Type
- Exhibition
"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.
In Katz, everything is still – the people and nature. Women are eternally young,
life is always joyful, souls are imperturbable.
Katz is the painter of ataraxia."
Vittorio Sgarbi
"The Sweet Life" is the exhibition that the Mart dedicates to one of the greatest living American artists: Alex Katz.
Born in New York in 1927, Katz reimagines references from mass culture, American society, television, advertising and, in his close-ups and shots, cinema. At the same time, he appropriates minimalist principles, stripping them of their ideological rigidity and focusing on the purely formal characteristics that define collective taste. Far removed from “intellectualisms”, it describes life for what it is: the pursuit of beauty and harmony.
In Katz's canvases, the atmospheres are suspended, serene, beyond the hectic pace of work and worries. In houses, trips to the seaside, everyday life, portraits and landscapes Katz depicts only what he knows: his New York and beloved Maine, where he spends long periods of time, the people closest to him, relatives and friends, and countless times his wife Ada, his first real muse, who appears in over 200 works.
More than twenty years after the last Italian exhibition, Mart presents in a single show and for the first time a wide selection of the works exhibited in Italy since the 1990s. Over 40 large canvases form a colourful itinerary representing the two great genres explored by the artist: portraits and landscapes. The exhibition underlines Katz's distance from the existentialist philosophies and political and social ambitions of much contemporary art and convey the happy carefreeness of his works, which celebrate the poetry of life and of a world made up of affections and places close to the heart. On show is one of the very rare nudes, as well as some sketches, a drawing and two videos, including the extract of a film made by director Ranuccio Sodi for television and never aired.