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Alex Katz | Out of Sight: A Drawing Survey

Location

Space

Dates

An abstract ink wash painting in reddish-orange on white paper, featuring thick, vertical strokes and gestural blotches that suggest a dense thicket of trees.
Preparatory drawing featuring delicate arrangement of dogwood flowers sprawling across the page. Thin, rapid, and expressive ink lines define the four-petaled blooms and pointed leaves.

Travel Details

Hudson River Museum
Yonkers, New York
February 19–July 18, 2027

About Alex Katz

Widely recognized as one of the leading artists of his generation, Alex Katz has developed a distinctive and remarkably influential approach to contemporary representational art, creating a celebrated body of work spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. Born in Brooklyn in 1927 and raised in St. Albans, Queens, Katz studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (1946–49). A scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture brought him to Maine for the first time in 1949, initiating a lifelong connection to the state and its distinctive environment. Alongside his landscape practice, Katz has consistently turned to the people and places of New York City as vital sources of inspiration.

Katz has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions, and his work is held in more than two hundred institutional collections around the world. The Colby Museum is home to the largest number of his works in any institution, with nearly nine hundred  paintings, drawings, and prints, primarily gifted by the artist. A rotating selection is continuously on view in the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz at the Colby Museum. Opened in 1995, the wing is one of the only museum spaces in the country devoted solely to the work of a single living artist. In 2004, Katz established the Alex Katz Foundation, which has placed hundreds of artworks—many by contemporary artists—into museum collections across the United States and Europe.

Selected Works

Alex Katz

Sketch on sheet of paper with visible perforation marks along the left edge. On the left, a man wearing a fedora and a suit jacket leans forward, focusing on a newspaper held in his hands. To his right, the partial figures of other commuters are suggested, including the torso of a person in a double-breasted coat and a hand gripping a vertical subway pole in the background.

Alex Katz

small-scale collage is divided horizontally into two sections: a solid cerulean blue top representing the sky and a tan bottom representing the sand. In the center, a cluster of figures is formed from cut-out pieces of colored paper. On the left, a man in a white shirt and on the right, a woman in a yellow top sit facing away from the viewer. Between them are smaller shapes in pink and dark grey, suggesting other individuals in the group. A faint signature is visible in the upper right corner of the blue sky.

Alex Katz

Preparatory drawing with multiple rough, gestural compositions for a larger work. Most of the small frames show clusters of figures in profile or from the back, rendered with quick, scribbled lines to suggest a crowded social setting. In the bottom right, the sketches transition from group scenes to two close-up studies of faces, one featuring a person wearing glasses. The paper is slightly aged with a visible crease in the top right corner.

Alex Katz

stylized, close-up study of white lilies. Several large, stark white blossoms dominate the composition, surrounded by thick, vibrant green leaves. The background is a flat, earthy reddish-brown. The painting is contained within a square border on a larger piece of paper, showing visible pencil lines and a signature at the top right.

Alex Katz

A small, centered ballpoint pen sketch of a man’s head on a rectangular sheet of off-white paper. The portrait is rendered in blue ink with quick, hatching lines used for shading across the man's face and neck.

Alex Katz

A delicate, light pencil sketch of a woman’s head and shoulders in profile, accompanied by a small, separate study of a hand. The portrait shows her looking toward the left with a hand resting near her chin.

Alex Katz

A large-scale profile drawing of a woman’s head and shoulders on reddish-brown paper. She is shown from the side with her chin resting on her hand, rendered with dark, bold charcoal or ink outlines and smudged tonal shading.

Alex Katz

A faint, centered pencil drawing of a woman's face on a large sheet of white paper . The portrait features large, detailed eyes and a neutral expression, with very light shading indicating long, voluminous hair.