Alex Katz (b. 1927)

One of the greatest and most influential living painters, Katz’s career is defined, since his emergence in the late ‘50s, by powerful and sure-handed portrayals of women. In Mae, Katz depicts a strong, defiant young girl, her arms crossed in front of her torso with her blue eyes piercing. Executed in subtle tonalities and luminous layers, Katz’s image of a young woman is a rare subject, as are his famed portraits of his wife Ada. Over the course of his career, Katz has continually reinvented both figural and landscape painting. His painting continues an important tradition of American figural painting and realism that includes giants such as Edward Hopper and John Singer Sergeant, two of the artist’s key influences. In the present lot, Katz embodies his pioneering contemporary representational style, casting Mae as an essential piece of the artist’s critically lauded output of the last two decades.