The Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT is pleased to announce the opening of ALEX KATZ: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art, a solo exhibition of works by one of America’s most honored living artists, on Sunday, December 8, 2013 from 2:00-4:00 p.m. The opening reception is free with Museum admission, and free to Museum members.

The exhibition, which remains on view through March 16, 2014, draws upon the Whitney’s extensive holdings of art by Alex Katz and includes the brilliantly-colored portraits of family and friends that are a hallmark of the artist’s career as well as early landscapes and collages.
 
Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout this country and internationally. His many credits include two honorary doctorate degrees, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum in New York, a Philip Morris Distinguished Artist Award from the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s Annual Artist of the City Award. 
 
Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and grew up in the St. Albans section of Queens. His Russian-born parents shared a deep interest in the arts. At Cooper Union’s School of Art, Katz was trained in modern art theories and techniques, later earning a scholarship for summer study at Maine’s Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. He has said that his experience of painting plein air at Skowhegan gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”
 
In New York during the 1950s, resisting the dominant abstractionism of the time, Katz associated with other figurative painters, among them Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter. Toward the latter part of the decade, his work evolved towards greater realism. Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture with monochrome backgrounds, painting his friends and family and especially his wife and muse, Ada. Influenced by panoramic films and billboard advertising during the 1960s, Katz began creating large-scale paintings, often depicting dramatically cropped faces in a style that was to become his artistic signature. The power of Katz’s portraits, said Dana Miller, Curator, Permanent Collection, of the Whitney Museum of American Art, “…comes from their color and their scale.”    
 
The Mattatuck Museum will offer several programs in conjunction with the exhibition including a film screening of Alex Katz: What About Style? on Thursday, December 12, 2013 at 5:30 p.m. This 56-minute video by filmmaker and art critic Heinz Peter Schwerfel captures Katz laboring over a 32-foot painting, The Black Brook. For details on this and other events, visit www.MattatuckMuseum.org/events.
 
The opening reception is free with Museum admission; RSVP is requested. Please register in advance at www.MattatuckMuseum.org or by calling (203) 753-0381, ext. 130. Join the museum to immediately qualify for member benefits.

Visit www.MattatuckMuseum.org or call (203) 753-0381 for more information on all of the museum’s adult and children’s programs, events and exhibits. The Mattatuck Museum is operated with support from the Connecticut Department of Economic & Community Development, CT Office of the Arts which also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and is a member of the Connecticut Art Trail, a group of 16 world-class museums and historic sites (www.arttrail.org). Located at 144 West Main Street, on the green in Waterbury, CT the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Free parking is located behind the building on Park Place.

This exhibition was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.