'I started going to Maine and I fell in love with the light… the colours are richer.' —Alex KatzAlex Katz’s Sunrise/Sunset portfolio depicts five views of the changing skies visible from his home in Maine. Using vivid colours as his backdrop, silhouetted foliage sprawls over the surface of the works. Referencing brushstrokes, the black marks allude to the inspiration behind these prints – a collection of large-scale landscape paintings of Maine that Katz first presented in New York in 2019.
Capturing the present tense is a key concern of Katz’s practice. In many of his works, light conditions serve as a temporal indication of the fleeting moments he aims to portray. In Sunrise/Sunset, Katz explores the flickering changes of lightness and darkness before one is overrun by the other. Variations in light – be it daily, seasonally, or geographically influenced – are central to Katz’s landscape works.
Katz’s work famously oscillates between realism and abstraction: “the grammar of my paintings is abstract, but basically the idea is to make something that seems like it’s realistic”. The subject matter of Sunrise/Sunset is instantly recognisable and reinforced by the title, but the close crops and overall flatness of the works – traits common in Katz’s oeuvre - distance them from realism. The result encourages the viewer to continuously reassess what they are seeing: a sunset or a sunrise, or flat colour fields overrun with abstract marks.
Catalogue Essay
Including Sunset I; Sunrise; Sunset II; Sunset III; and Twilight
2020 The complete set of five archival pigment prints in colours, on Innova Etching Cotton Rag paper, the full sheets. all S. various, largest 101.8 x 223.3 cm (40 1/8 x 87 7/8 in.), three vertical All signed and numbered 16/35 in pencil (there were also 8 artist's proofs), published by Lococo Fine Art, St. Louis, Missouri (with their ink stamp on the reverse), all framed.