Alex Katz

Alex Katz, a painter from New York, has been focusing his attention on paintings of figures and landscapes for almost four decades. Influenced by the work of Henri Matisse, but also by the cool artificiality of anonymous commercial art and the monumental flatness of billboards, he has developed stylised portraits which resemble expansive landscapes. In larger-than-life formats, the banal protagonists of his pictures acquire the aura of cinema stars.