Alex Katz: Theater and Dance
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA - Feb 22 – June 8
Over a career spanning eight decades, the painter Alex Katz has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums. Less well known are Katz’s designs for the stage. Alex Katz: Theater and Dance illuminates this body of work, bringing together production drawings and designs, paintings and archival materials, some never before exhibited.
Emerging as a painter in the 1950s, Katz diverged from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant trend at that time. He sought to create “a contemporary representational painting” focusing on portraits and landscapes. Influenced by Pop Art, his style featured simplified forms and flat surfaces that achieve depth through painterly texture and dense, complex color. During two summers at the Skowhegan School for Painting & Sculpture in Maine, he developed an appreciation for the immediacy of plein-air painting and a fascination with the intensity of natural light. These characteristics form the core of a singular self-created genre that Katz continues to pursue to the present day.
By the late 1950s, Katz’s growing reputation as a painter gave him entré to the New York art scene. In 1960, he began designing sets and costumes for the choreographer Paul Taylor. They went on to collaborate on 16 dance productions, a creative relationship that led Katz to work with other theater and dance companies and significantly influenced postmodern dance in the 20th century. Katz’s ideas about form, color and light carried over into his designs for the stage and the two disciplines fed each other. The scale of his paintings expanded, and he produced many images of dancers: portraits as well as larger compositions based on scenes from performances.
The exhibition and accompanying catalog were produced by the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, home to a collection of nearly 900 works by Katz. The show includes pieces from the artist’s personal collection and the Paul Taylor Dance Company archives. The Frye Art Museum is the show’s first West Coast venue.
Panel discussion on art and dance collaborations March 1, 3–4:15pm
