书名：Alex Katz: Painting the Now/亚历克斯·卡茨：绘画进行时！

作者：Jacob Proctor

出版：Hirmer Publishers，2019年

装帧：精装 , 120页

尺寸：26.6*33 cm

美国画家亚历克斯·卡茨的职业生涯现在已经跨越了近70年，举办约200场个人展览和500余场群展。他获得了纽约国家学院博物馆 (National Academy Museum) 颁发的终身成就奖，被授予两个荣誉博士学位，并被获得柏林美国学院(American Academy of Berlin) 授予的菲利普·莫里斯杰出艺术家称号。如今他的作品可以在全世界100多家公共机构的收藏中找到——这距离其于1927年在纽约布鲁克林出生的开端已走过了很长一段路。

这本论文集追溯了卡茨从20世纪50年代抽象表现主义全盛时期在纽约艺术界崭露头角，到其职业生涯的各个创作阶段。但正如这些文章所显示的，这位波普艺术先驱一直具有一种独特的美学，使他与同时代的其他画家区分开来。他受到当代音乐、舞蹈和诗歌的影响，明确、特立独行地追求现代形式的现实主义。从其描绘家人、朋友与艺术合作者的标志性肖像，到不太为人所知的风景和城市场景，卡茨完美的技术和对画作表面的敏感性，与其电影、时尚和广告的形式语言之间形成富有效果的张力。

本书是对于艺术家生活的汇编，令人印象深刻。书中收录100余张亚历克斯·卡茨的作品插图，以及最近的文章和采访，阐明了他对众多当代艺术家产生的影响。他致力于表现人类感知的即时性，正如他所言，“以现在时态作画”。

American painter Alex Katz’s career has now spanned nearly seven decades, two hundred solo exhibitions, and five hundred group exhibitions. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York, been awarded two honorary doctorates and named the Philip Morris Distinguished Artist at the American Academy of Berlin. Today, his works can be found in over one hundred public collections worldwide—a long way from his beginnings in Brooklyn, New York, where he was born in 1927.

This collection of essays follows Katz from his emergence on the New York art scene in the 1950s—during the heyday of abstract expressionism—through every creative phase of his career. But as the essays show, this pioneer of pop art has always had a unique aesthetic that stood him apart from other painters of his generation. Influenced by contemporary music, dance, and poetry, he pursued his own idiosyncratic and decidedly modern form of realism. From his iconic portraits of family, friends, and artistic collaborators to his less well-known landscapes and city scenes, Katz’s consummate technique and sensitivity for painterly surfaces unfolded in productive tension with the formal languages of film, fashion, and advertising.

Illustrated with over one hundred color images and including recent essays and interviews illuminating his influence on contemporary artists, Alex Katz is an impressive compilation of the life of an artist who devoted himself to the representation of the immediacy of human perception and, as he calls it, “painting in the present tense.”