Artist: Alex Katz [American, b. 1927]
Title: Forest
Medium: Aquatint in Five Colors
Year: 1992
Image Size: 29.25" x 66.25"
Frame Size: 35.75" x 72.75" x 1"
Edition: 38/40 + 12 AP
Publisher: Simmelink/Sukimoto Editions, New York
Signature: Signed and numbered in graphite on front lower left
Documentation: Gallery Certificate of Authenticity
Literature: Catalogue Raisonne Schroder 256
Alex Katz's "Forest", executed in 1992, exemplifies the artist's sustained engagement with landscape as a subject for formal reduction, translating the dense visual complexity of woodland into a panoramic composition built from flattened planes of color. Rendered as an aquatint in five colors, the print's elongated horizontal format, nearly five and a half feet wide, immerses the viewer in an expansive, screen like view of tree trunks and foliage, a compositional strategy Katz employed frequently in his large scale landscape works of the early 1990s to evoke both physical scale and pictorial flatness. The aquatint process allowed Katz to achieve rich, saturated tonal fields, translating the loose, economical brushwork of his paintings into a printmaking medium capable of similar chromatic depth and surface uniformity.
Published by Simmelink/Sukimoto Editions, New York, the work is part of an edition of 40, with 12 artist's proofs; the present example is numbered 38/40. It is signed and numbered in graphite at the lower left. The image measures 29 1/4 by 66 1/4 inches, with a frame size of 35 3/4 by 72 3/4 by 1 inch. The print is documented in the catalogue raisonne of Katz's prints as Schroder 256, and is accompanied by a gallery Certificate of Authenticity.
"Forest" reflects Katz's broader practice of applying the graphic vocabulary developed in his portraiture, including bold contour, flattened color, and reduction of incidental detail, to the natural landscape, reinforcing his position as a central figure in postwar American figurative and landscape painting.
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About Alex Katz
Alex Katz [born 1927] is a leading American painter celebrated for pioneering a distinctive style of figurative art defined by flat planes of color, sharp contours, and large-scale compositions. Emerging in New York during the 1950s, Katz forged an independent path apart from the prevailing Abstract Expressionist movement, instead drawing inspiration from billboards, film, and everyday visual culture to develop a cool, graphic aesthetic that would later resonate with Pop Art sensibilities.
Trained at Cooper Union and later at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Katz honed his technique of painting directly from life, producing quick oil sketches that informed his larger studio works. His mature style eliminates extraneous detail, reducing figures and landscapes to essential shapes and high-contrast color relationships. This economy of form became his signature, distinguishing his portraits of cultural figures, family members, and particularly his wife Ada, who appears in hundreds of his paintings.
Katz's landscape paintings, often depicting the woods and coastline near Lincolnville, Maine, apply the same reductive vocabulary to nature, emphasizing pattern, light, and flattened perspective. His work bridges representational painting and modernist abstraction, offering a distinctly American vision of postwar visual culture.
Widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, Katz's paintings are held in the permanent collections of major institutions, including the Whitney Museum, MoMA, and the Tate. Now in his nineties, Katz remains an active and influential presence in contemporary art, celebrated for a style that continues to shape figurative painting today.
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