BT: Bringing Innovation & Technology Together

Acquisitions

Featured Acquisitions and Gifts

ARTIST ROOMS: The d'Offay Donation

Alex Katz (born 1927)

One room comprising a group of 20 small paintings.

The American painter Alex Katz began working in the 1950s, focusing on figurative subjects which set him apart from the avant-garde mainstream but brought him public recognition in the 1980s when many young artists began to work in related ways. Primarily working from life, Katz produces images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed strokes and planes of flat colour. Although best-known for large-scale portraits, painted in his distinctive, stylised manner, Katz has also consistently made small paintings primarily as studies, which function as independent pieces and which can be considered as a distinct body of work. This group of 20 small paintings in The d’Offay Donation spans his career. The collection also shows the artist’s preoccupation with landscape and in many of the works Katz tends towards a more expressionistic approach, with reductive compositions such as Green Shadow #2 (1998) and 3pm, November (1997) that display a debt to Japanese art in their close-up, cropped compositions.

Artists

National Heritage Memorial Fund       The Art Fund       Department for Culture, Media and Sport      The Scottish Government

 

Previous Featured Acquisitions and Gifts