The High Museum of Art recently acquired three important works for its contemporary art collection. Renowned American artist Alex Katz has given the Museum a painting titled “Twilight” (1998), which is joined by the High’s recent purchases of Katz’s “Winter Landscape 2” (2007) and “Untitled” (2009), a large-scale, mirror-polished steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor. The two new Katz acquisitions have been installed in the Museum, along with two other large-scale paintings by Katz, “Dawn 3” (1995) and “Meadow” (1997), which are on long-term loan from the artist. The four  monumental paintings were installed together to establish a monographic gallery dedicated to Katz in the Wieland Pavilion’s skyway galleries, joining other monographic installations by Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter.

“The High’s collection of contemporary art is growing in exciting and diverse ways, and signals our commitment to creating an anthology of important 21st-century works,” commented Michael Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director. “We are grateful to Alex for his generous gift of ‘Twilight’ and look forward to adding to our holdings of his work; his extraordinary paintings bridge the Museum’s fine collection of post-painterly abstraction with its expanding collection of Pop art.”

“Winter Landscape 2” (2007) and “Twilight” (1998) are the first paintings by Alex Katz to enter the High’s collection and build significantly upon the Museum’s group of important works by masters of American Pop art such as Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann. Katz is currently represented in the High’s collection by five prints produced between 1969 and 1972. Although well-known as a figurative painter, Katz has always been recognized for his landscape paintings, which have played a central role in his work from the time he studied painting at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1949–1950). Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting program gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.” 

In addition, the recently acquired steel sculpture “Untitled” (2009) by Turner Prize-winning British artist Anish Kapoor marks both a departure for the artist and a return to a seminal and emblematic form in his oeuvre―the concave dish. Now fragmented by a repeating triangular pattern, the surface of the dish distorts its viewer in a multiplicity of fragmented images, reflecting Kapoor’s interest in fractals. The work will be on view in July, alongside Kapoor’s work “Pot for Her.” In addition, the artist’s London-based studio is lending the sculpture “Marsupial” (2006). All three works will be installed together in the Wieland Pavilion, creating the first monographic installation of work by Kapoor in Atlanta.

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