Why go to Rovereto for the Alex Katz exhibition

Ninety-four years and don’t prove them at all (take a look at the works that we offer in the gallery …). The American Alex Katz, master of contemporary painting, with 70 years of creativity behind him, hundreds of exhibitions (this is her anns: in June it will be at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation of Madrid in August at the Guggenheim in New York) arrives in Italy and for his own first solo show in two decades in our country chooses the Mart of Roveretoone of those modern and contemporary art museums that are always worth visiting (the permanent collection is splendid, the location in the heart of Trentino is suggestive).

Until September 18th forty large canvases with bright colors, some of the landscape but the majority are portraits (in the gallery we have selected the ones that struck us most) occupy with their pop elegance the rooms of the Mart for Alex Katz. The sweet life.

Happily disengagedAlex Katz, born in Brooklyn, New York to the core, is a complete painter and artist (he collaborated with poets and writers, designing books and covers, and then with choreographers and dancers: for 50 years he also worked as a set designer and costume designer for there Paul Taylor Dance Company) and here his world is shown.

Often associated with the movement of the Pop art, Alex Katz appears to us as a less convoluted Hopper. Yet, looking at her closely, her painting is anything but banal. The taste for minimalismfor the harmony of shapes and colors: Nothing is left to chance.

With the’apparent lightness of the themes and with the unmistakable clarity of the colored backgrounds, Katz ends up representing a “happy anomaly “ not only in the panorama of the great American art of the twentieth century but also in Europe. A convincing exception: original because honest, never contrived.

You look at the subjects and you immediately understand that that woman is a friend (or his wife Ada, who appears many times in the exhibition) or that that landscape lives in her beloved New York or even in her second home, in Maine (which inspired them the landscape images that you can also find here).

The beauty of Katz is that he only paints what he knows.

In his works the atmospheres are suspended, serenebeyond the hectic time of our work and our thousands of worries: they work (at least for us it was like this) almost like a antistress.

His dry, linear, precise style is pure poetry of shapes and colors and it reminds us how important it is to look for – and fix in the mind – the extraordinary in the ordinary of every day.