The Marlborough Gallery Barcelona and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum dedicate exhibitions to Alex Katz

The Marlborough Gallery in Barcelona, in its line of recovering Anglo-American artists with a figurative tendency, presents the exhibition Alex Katz. Paper work , coinciding with a retrospective of the painter at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which he will be able to visit from 11 June to 11 September.

A pioneer in the reinterpretation of figurative themes, from his first exhibition in 1954 at the Roko Gallery in New York, Alex Katz (New York, 1927) focuses on portraits of family, friends and landscapes. Katz elevates to the artistic category works starring elements of everyday life and creates iconographic images without emotional content generalizing the characteristics of a model or a landscape, making them familiar to all viewers and generating an unmistakable artistic body of portraits in solitary, duplicate and group, alternating with its recognizable flowers and surrounded by brightly colored landscapes and flat backgrounds.

Katz's portraits depict the characters from a perspective unrelated to psychological introspection, accentuating the sense of incommunicado detention they are subjected to. True to the figurative representation, his work is indebted to that of compatriot Edward Hooper, with whom he shares a taste for the use of a disturbing realism in which the characters bear witness to loneliness and isolation.

The exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is the first retrospective in the state on the American painter Alex Katz, one of the leading figures in the history of American art of the twentieth century and a forerunner of the 'pop art, which is still active. The exhibition is curated by Guillermo Solana, the museum's artistic director, and has the support of the artist himself and his studio, who are following the project in detail. The installation brings together almost forty large-format oils, accompanied by some studies, which allows you to take a tour of Katz's usual themes: his solo, duplicate and group portraits, alternating with his recognizable flowers and surrounding landscapes of vivid colors and flat backgrounds.