Nicole
Alex Katz American
Not on view
Nicole is emblematic of Katz’s so-called "Black Paintings," which the artist began to create at the turn of the twenty first century. In these works, Katz subsumes his subjects within fields of unmodulated black paint reminiscent of modernist monochromes. Against this black field, Katz’s flat, highly stylized sitter stands in bold relief, with nothing to anchor her to a specific time or place besides her fashionable coat. Representation and abstraction exist in productive tension. Nicole has the scale and proportions of billboards and movie screens, conventions with which Katz has long experimented. Through this and other means, including cropping and fragmentation, the artist calls attention to the mechanics of vision and the theatrics of spectatorship, self-consciously referencing how humans perceive objects in the world.
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