ARTISTS
Alex Katz
"It all started with Henri Matisse's The Red Studio. I saw it in The Modern. I was like 20, 21. I just thought it was dynamite. I could relate to the experience of seeing a red room because it's an actual visual experience that happens when you're outside in the bright sun, surrounded by green, and then you go into a room, and there's a red flash behind the eye. That's what he was after. His idea was the after image. So, I was working from that red flash, but my orange and white are cooler than Matisse's.
He's optical, very optical. He's held down by the literal, and my paintings are not literal. I started out doing literal paintings, but I moved away. I guess I miss the sentiment of objective painting, but I don't want to do it anymore; I want to do something else. The summer before this last one, I just went up to Maine with one tube of orange paint. I started with photographs of a road and worked them into these orange paintings. They came all at once. I like orange because it's dissonant. It has a certain weight, and it's an abrasive color. It really goes out after you. It's not one of these nice, harmonious colors. It's not Park Avenue. I like the abrasiveness. I think my paintings are generally abrasive. That's why I had so much trouble. I didn't realize they would upset so many people for so many years.
The paintings of the road, I thought, were very successful. They look new. I painted them with one color; they're about 10 and a half feet high, and I got away with it. I felt great. I got away with painting with one color and one brush. And say, 'This is a painting,' and it is. It's not a drawing, it's a painting. And I've never seen a painting like that before." -Alex Katz, 2025
Gladstone Gallery will present 11 new paintings by Alex Katz inspired by Henri Matisse's The Red Studio (1911). Each work is environmental in scale, using only a single orange on a white ground, and depicts the road in Maine where he has lived and worked every summer for almost 70 years. The view down this road is now so familiar to Katz that it has become embedded in his subconscious. He has rendered this vista numerous times over the decades, yet now, in this exhibition, the paintings seem to be formed from the unconscious memory rather than the eye. The image dematerializes, reduced to its elemental form. The viewer, standing before the orange void, falls into the space and into the years. Also accompanying the exhibition is a DRAWING RESTRAINT by Matthew Barney, which explores the then 96-year-old Katz at work on one of these enormous canvases.
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"It all started with Henri Matisse's The Red Studio. I saw it in The Modern. I was like 20, 21. I just thought it was dynamite. I could relate to the experience of seeing a red room because it's an actual visual experience that happens when you're outside in the bright sun, surrounded by green, and then you go into a room, and there's a red flash behind the eye. That's what he was after. His idea was the after image. So, I was working from that red flash, but my orange and white are cooler than Matisse's.
He's optical, very optical. He's held down by the literal, and my paintings are not literal. I started out doing literal paintings, but I moved away. I guess I miss the sentiment of objective painting, but I don't want to do it anymore; I want to do something else. The summer before this last one, I just went up to Maine with one tube of orange paint. I started with photographs of a road and worked them into these orange paintings. They came all at once. I like orange because it's dissonant. It has a certain weight, and it's an abrasive color. It really goes out after you. It's not one of these nice, harmonious colors. It's not Park Avenue. I like the abrasiveness. I think my paintings are generally abrasive. That's why I had so much trouble. I didn't realize they would upset so many people for so many years.
The paintings of the road, I thought, were very successful. They look new. I painted them with one color; they're about 10 and a half feet high, and I got away with it. I felt great. I got away with painting with one color and one brush. And say, 'This is a painting,' and it is. It's not a drawing, it's a painting. And I've never seen a painting like that before." -Alex Katz, 2025
Gladstone Gallery will present 11 new paintings by Alex Katz inspired by Henri Matisse's The Red Studio (1911). Each work is environmental in scale, using only a single orange on a white ground, and depicts the road in Maine where he has lived and worked every summer for almost 70 years. The view down this road is now so familiar to Katz that it has become embedded in his subconscious. He has rendered this vista numerous times over the decades, yet now, in this exhibition, the paintings seem to be formed from the unconscious memory rather than the eye. The image dematerializes, reduced to its elemental form. The viewer, standing before the orange void, falls into the space and into the years. Also accompanying the exhibition is a DRAWING RESTRAINT by Matthew Barney, which explores the then 96-year-old Katz at work on one of these enormous canvases.
Artists on show
