Alex Katz

A single face fills the canvas. There is almost no modelling, the ground is one colour, and the expression cannot be read. As large as a billboard and as silent as one. In the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was the whole of painting, Katz refused to give up the figure. What he gave up instead was narrative and psychology. What remains is scale, colour, and where he cuts. He has painted his wife Ada more than 250 times. Paint the same person for sixty years and the portrait stops being a record of a person and becomes a record of time. He still paints the Maine summer the same way.