The Thyssen summarizes in 40 works the seven prodigious decades of activity of the brilliant and non-agenaric New York painter / «I follow my instinct, I overcome my fears and I make things happen without knowing very well what art is»
He has been painting for seven decades without dismay, but he assures that neither he nor anyone ‘knows what art is’. “I just follow my instincts and make things happen. And I’m more creative when I’m not doing anything,” warns Alex Katz, (New York, 1927), who, at the age of 95, offers his first major retrospective in Spain.
The Thyssen Museum summarizes in forty paintings, some recent and many of monumental proportions, the unique and happy trajectory of this giant of contemporary art, an ‘outsider’ of American painting. A gifted artist who advanced and navigated the wave of pop to leave it behind, changing the rules of the genre and incorporating keys of abstraction and expressionism into his vitalist painting.
«Summarizing seventy years of painting by a god of painting like Katz in just forty works is a ‘tour de force’, a guts. Given the size of many of them, it was like putting a sailboat in a glass bottle,” explains Guillermo Solana, the museum’s artistic director and curator of the exhibition of the year at his home. Scheduled for 2020, it said on the verge of being lost, first because of the pandemic and then because of the brutal rise in transportation and insurance prices.”Eventually we had a direct line with God. It’s like organizing a Titian exhibition and he himself told you which painting you should hang and how. It’s a privilege,” congratulates Solana. On the bill until September 11, it also anticipates what has been dedicated to Katz by the Guggenheim in New York.
“Katz has remained and remains true to figuration, and he is one of the few artists to have survived in this sometimes underappreciated or directly maligned genre,” Solana says. “Using the large formats and sources of abstraction gives his painting a heroic spirit,” Solana boasts of Katz’s “vital and ‘cool'” work that “lives in the present and unloaded with nostalgia”.
Spare his words, lanky, slim and agile, bald as a billiard ball, jet black sunglasses, white coat, black shirt and red tie, Katz looks like an old mob boss or Mike Jagger’s roguish father. Reluctant to the “useless” press conferences and to share emotions and reflections, he puts his words and answers initially with monosyllables. But in the end, Pop’s grumpy grandfather gives in and gives some insight into his work.
“As I get older I spend more time painting alone, but I have no problem with people who used to drink and smoke and now don’t drink or smoke and lock themselves up at home,” explains the great social portraitist who flirts with landscape today. .
He gets up every day at 7:30 in the morning and paints seven days a week. “Sometimes just 20 minutes and sometimes 12 hours,” he confesses. “If you work too much manually, the thing won’t work. You have to do a lot of intellectual work,” he says. “I’m much more creative when I’m not doing anything. Taking advantage of that time of physical inactivity will get you further,” says the nearly 100-year-old artist who still climbs scaffolding and ladders in his New York studio to paint gigantic canvases that require significant physical effort, often in a matter of hours. . “I don’t mess around with screens, tablets, or computers and barely touch the phone,” he says.
“I’ve limited myself to following my instincts and it hasn’t gone bad for me,” he assures, giving an evil smile. «When I was twenty I shot thousands of paintings – he is exaggerating – but by the age of forty I already had a refined technique and a better judgment. Now I am active and competent,” he says. “I want to find the truth, which is very variable, and I do it in very different ways, without ever knowing whether they will work or not. I follow my instinct and overcome the fears I still have “I try for a while to understand what I’m doing and then I do something else,” he explains, justifying his evolution, his colorful and monumental portraits interspersed with landscapes that are just as vivid and huge, but very synthetic For example, you can dedicate a canvas of almost four meters to a solitary maple branch.
“Art is constant change, and success or failure has more to do with what the dealers say than your intuition,” he says. “People think they know what art is, but it’s art that reaches you and defines you. It’s something unexpected.”
The Thyssen did not have paintings by Katz in its fantastic collection, but the purchase of an exceptional piece by Borja and Blanca Thyssen will allow it to add to its list. Tita Cevera’s son has acquired ‘Vivien’ for an undisclosed amount, a spectacular canvas measuring almost four by two meters in which Katz incorporates the face of his daughter-in-law five times. The new owners have promised to leave it in the museum when the exhibit closes at the end of the summer.
“My paintings are traditional and it’s no problem that they are here, in the Thyssen, with the great masters of history,” says a multimillion-dollar painter without a hint of modesty (one of his pieces was nearly 4 million in history). 2019), whose works compete for the best museums in the world.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
