Alex Katz: Quick Things Passing

Two exhibits of the works of Alex Katz (b.1927) are currently on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.

The first exhibit, Alex Katz/Out of Sight: A Drawing Survey focuses on preparatory drawings, collages and cartoons that make up part of the artist’s practice.

Many of the more than seventy works on view are from Katz’s personal collection, the Colby Museum collection and on loan from private and institutional collections. Some of the works have never been on exhibit before.

The second exhibit, Alex Katz: Quick Things Passing, looks at the way in which Katz captures a moment in time in the life of family, friends and surroundings.

Katz has had a long, generous relationship the Colby Museum. He made his first trip to Maine in 1949, when he received a Cooper Union scholarship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1954 he set up a summer home and studio in Lincolnville, about an hour drive from the museum.

Over the years, Katz has donated over 400 works to the museum…his own and the works of other artists. In 1996, the museum dedicated a wing to his works and he received an honorary doctorate from the College in 1984.

Alex Katz/Out of Sight: A Drawing Survey will be on view through October 11, 2026. Alex Katz: Quick Things Passing will be on view through January 17, 2027.

Katz continues to maintain a home studio in SoHo, in the same building where he has lived and worked since 1968.

 

I’m pre-pixel. They got it from me. - Chuck Close (1940-2021)

A room filled with giant portraits of Alex Katz were on view at Pace Prints Gallery in New York a few months ago. The exhibit focused on Close’s works on paper, which emphasize his use of the grid.

Close worked in a variety of medium, capturing the faces of the people around him, even though many of the faces eluded him: Close was born with several medical problems, including Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which is the inability to recognized faces, including his own.

Still, he pursued a career as an artist, receiving his MFA from Yale in 1964 and going on to at study at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on a Fulbright grant.

In 1988, Close had a seizure that left him paralyzed and wheelchair bound, but he continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist, and an assistant creating the grids on canvas.

Close began printmaking in 1972 and went to Kyoto to work with Tadashi Toda, a highly respected woodblock printer.

He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2000.

Besides his many self-portraits, Close painted artists, musicians and celebrities like Lou Reed, Oprah, Brad Pitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Lucas Samaras and Barack Obama.

Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Alex Katz and Chuck Close available at VFA.

References:
Benjamin Clifford. Chuck Close and Pulp. The Brooklyn Rail. March 2026.