ADAA Fair
Alex Katz – Works on Paper
Park Avenue Armory, New York
Preview Gala: November 12
November 13 – 16
Booth C3
Spanning from the 1950s to the 2020s, the presentation highlights the evolution of Alex Katz’s distinctive visual language through two pivotal mediums: his early cut paper collages and his career-long engagement with charcoal and graphite. Across these media, Katz’s style remains unmistakable—cool, detached, yet intimate. Whether through the tactile layering of paper in the 1950s or the expressive mark-making of his recent charcoal drawings, the medium strips away the decorative in favor of the essential. These works on paper provide a raw, honest look into Katz’s artistic process and the foundations of his approach to modern portraiture and landscape. Collectively, they showcase a command of line and composition that has remained consistent throughout his long and influential career.
“The collages obey the principle of medium specificity, but they also reach beyond their proper medium toward other, analogous forms, such as wood-cuts, linocuts, lithographs or photography itself as an act of light and dark imprinting traces on a receptive surface.
The pleasure offered by the collages, as by much art that I cherish, is suddennes: art that seems to mind its own business, to be going nowhere, to be biding its time, suddenly shocks the viewer’s eye with a detail that unleashes a loud annunciation, a clarifying thunderbolt, a Godot who changed his mind and showed up.”
— Wayne Koestenbaum, “Staring Blankly: Reflections on Alex Katz’s Collages,” in Gathering exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2022)
"For Katz, drawing has never been a means to an end, but a lifelong practice, one that attunes us to the very act of perception, revealing visions as a process of sustained and iterative inquiry, sharpened by technique and time."
— Kiko Aebi, “Learning to See Differently and More,” in Alex Katz: Out of Sight exh. cat. (Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, 2026)
Alex Katz
While Alex Katz is widely recognized for his stylized oil portraits, his collages and charcoal and graphite drawings reveal a different dimension of his artistic sensibility—one emphasizing economy, immediacy, and gesture. Across both collage and charcoal, Katz’s style remains unmistakable—cool, detached, yet intimate. Whether through the tactile layering of paper in the 1950s or the expressive mark-making of his recent charcoal drawings, the medium strips away the decorative in favor of the essential. These works on paper provide a raw, honest look into Katz’s artistic process and the foundations of his approach to modern portraiture. Collectively, they showcase a command of line and composition that has remained consistent throughout his long and influential career.
Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art (1946–49) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1949–50). Recent solo exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art, NY (2024); and the Guggenheim Museum, NY (2023) among others. Public collections include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The National Gallery of Art, DC; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY among others.
*All works are subject to availability; all prices are subject to change.
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