Alex Katz

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Katz began painting beach scenes in the late 1990s, painting 'en plein air' in an attempt to grasp the colour and light of a specific moment. This work explores the effects of light on water with deft brush marks. He has been painting the American landscape since the 1950s, often during summer residencies in Maine. Katz is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colours are now seen as precursors of Pop Art. Small oil paintings such as this one are sketched from life and often intended to be scaled up into larger works, but their economic execution and visible brushstrokes reveal an intimate side to his practice. He says, "A sketch is very direct. It is working empirically, inside of an idea."

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