Foreword

Welcome to New River Fine Art’s 25th Anniversary Year. For 25 years, New River Fine Art has brought exhibitions from esteemed artists such as Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol to name a few. I am thrilled and honored to begin our Silver Celebration with Alex Katz: In Good Company .

The artist once said “Most painters, when they get older, they get worse. And the real good ones get better.” At 95 years of age. Alex Katz has secured his position among the most celebrated Contemporary living artists of our time. Not only did he get better, Katz continues to improve with age. As a testament to his unparalleled excellence, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York recently opened a retrospective exhibition entitled Alex Katz: Gathering,which continues through February 2023.

Alex Katz: In Good Companycelebrates five decades of the artist’s prints, paintings, and drawings. Throughout his career, Katz has railed against au courant trends in favor of blazing his own trail. When Abstract Expressionism was in vogue, he gravitated to his own brand of Realism where direct study of the figure and nature were paramount. His work does not hint at a past or future, but rather focuses on the now, capturing an evanescent moment in time.

Over the years, the artist’s oeuvre has centered around New York’s art and intellectual cognoscenti, whose stylized portraits are emblematic of the ultimate cool. Katz gravitated to a close-knit circle of friends and family who serve as repetitive models functioning in Katz’s art as renewed experiences in an ongoing world. First and foremost, among these models is his wife Ada, who has appeared in hundreds of paintings and prints, and is the subject of the of paintings and prints, and is the subject of the synonymous Ada Portfoliofeatured in our exhibition. After 65 years of marriage, the artist has studied the curve of her smile and the shape of her eyes for decades and now he pays tribute to his love and muse with 10 new works, drawn from some of his favorite Ada paintings of all times.

When not stripping down a portrait to its barest essentials, Katz works from nature, but maintains his signature aesthetic even in the landscape, as exemplified in Luna Park II, 1973 and Black Brook, 1989. The Flowers Portfoliofrom 2021 captures the beauty and complexity of nature in the guileless and elegant forms of individual flowers.

While the exhibition features paintings, drawings, and graphic work, it is in his printmaking that Katz truly shines. His early prints explored the flatness of the plane and were often printed in muted colors. As he gained confidence and experience, Katz’s printmaking became more experimental and saturated with color, reflecting the culture and society he depicted. His recent prints are magnum opus examples of Katz’s signature style that boldly reflect just how much the artist has improved with age. I invite you to join in New River Fine Art’s Silver Celebration, explore the exhibition and collect works from this American Icon. I guarantee you’ll be In Good Company .

- Lisa Burgess