Alex Katz

Alex Katz's paintings and sculptures monumentalize common moments of everyday life. Katz was influenced by the golden age of the billboard business when hand-painted advertisements became an art form as well as a distraction on America's highways. He paints in a simple, direct style using large areas of unmodulated colors to attract our attention. Roadside signs with moving parts, in which the figures extended beyond the billboard, also motivated Katz to produce canvas cutouts pasted onto wooden boards, fashioning life-size figures that are like huge paper dolls. (Marshall, Alex Katz, 1986)