The historical
school, Yuuhisai Koudoukan Foundation, is pleased to welcome a solo exhibition
of celebrated American painter, Alex Katz, from Nov. 16th thru Dec. 6th, 2023.
This exhibition is the first time of Alex Katz has shown in Japan since 1991.
In this show Katz will present 20 studies including spring and summer trees
from 2023 and portraits of his friends and family. In addition, one large
summer landscape painting completes the exhibition. For Katz, the historical
city of Kyoto is the one place on earth where he says he found a ‘perfect
balance’. The studies of Spring and Summer trees were made with this sense of balance
in mind. They were made using the memory of light and moment of sight - the
memory of the sensation of seeing. And like light, and memory they are quick,
intense and unmeasurable.
The trees are coming
into leaf
Like something
almost being said;
The recent buds
relax and spread,
Their greenness is a
kind of grief.
Is it that they are
born again
And we grow old? No,
they die too,
Their yearly trick
of looking new
Is written down in
rings of grain.
Yet still the
unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown
thickness every May.
Last year is dead,
they seem to say,
Begin afresh,
afresh, afresh.
_“The Trees,” Philip Larkin
Alex
Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) is the preeminent painter of modern life.
Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and striking landscape depictions, the now
96 year old Katz has inspired generations of painters.
Katz's
work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo presentations over
the course of his expansive career. His work is in the permanent collections of
over one hundred museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the
Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the
Art Institute of Chicago; the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine;
the Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou and the Fondation Louis Vuitton,
Paris; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and the Nationalgalerie,
Berlin.
Katz
lives and works in New York. He was the 2019 Honoree at TWO x TWO for AIDS and
Art and had a solo survey exhibition at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai in
2020. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,
Madrid; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; and the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenar; as
well as a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York.
Organizer: PIBI Gallery, Seoul / Gladstone Gallery, New York
Co-organizer: Yuuhisai Koudoukan Foundation
Photography of artwork & artist by David Regen
Photography of exhibition by Mitsuru Wakabayashi