Alex Katz in Maine

Alex Katz is one of the most important painters of our era. Having come of age in the 1950s, alongside the New York School of painters and poets, he still continues to influence generations of artists with his iconic figurative work. Best known for his emotionally ambivalent and psychologically complex portraits of cosmopolitan friends and colleagues from the New York art world, he is also revered for his bold, transcendent landscape paintings and his coolly intimate portraits of friends and family--oftentimes painted in Maine, where Katz has habitually summered for the past 50 years. Many of Katz's most poetic, melancholy, and slyly humorous works have been made in or about the state of Maine, and they are reproduced here in conjunction with the Farnsworth Museum of Art's Summer, 2005 exhibition. The Maine paintings capture friends and family relaxing in off moments, seasonal changes in light and other momentary excerpts from reality.