Alex Katz Gray Day Signed Color Screenprint 1992 Edition of 75

Artist: Alex Katz (American, b. 1927)
Title: Gray Day
Medium: Color screen-print on Arches Paper
Year: 1992
Size: Sheet 22" x 72". Framed 35" x 83.25".
Edition: 6/75, Published by Chalk & Vermillion Fine Arts, Greenwich, Connecticut. Printed by Styria Studio, Inc., New York.
Signature: Signed and numbered in pencil on front lower margin
Documentation: Gallery Certificate of Authenticity
Literature: Catalogue Raisonne Schröder 255.

Gray Day (1992) is a monumental color screen-print by American artist Alex Katz, measuring 22 × 72 inches. Printed in multiple colors on Arches 100% rag paper by Styria Studio, Inc., New York, and published by Chalk & Vermillion Fine Arts, Greenwich, Connecticut, the work belongs to Katz’s sustained exploration of portraiture, landscape, and the visual language of contemporary American life. The composition presents a tightly cropped portrait of a woman wearing sunglasses and a red cap against a muted coastal landscape. The figure has been identified as Ada Katz, the artist’s wife and longtime muse, pictured near the family’s summer home in Lincolnville, Maine.

Katz’s characteristic use of simplified forms, sharply defined contours, and broad areas of color creates a deliberate tension between the intimacy of portraiture and the detached, graphic quality of commercial imagery. The unusually elongated horizontal format emphasizes the relationship between figure and landscape while giving the composition a cinematic quality. Although the image appears visually economical, sources document the use of numerous separate colors in its production.

Gray Day is catalogued as Schröder 255 and was issued in an edition of 75. A work from the edition is held by the Colby College Museum of Art, a 1996 acquisition as a gift from the artist. Another impression was held by the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, and was featured in the 2012 Alex Katz Prints exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Purchase includes a gallery certificate of authenticity from Modern Artifact.

About Alex Katz:

Alex Katz (born 1927) is an American artist known for his distinctive paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Katz studied at The Cooper Union School of Art before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. His early career developed in New York during the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism dominated the American art scene. Katz instead pursued a direct, representational approach to painting that became closely associated with his signature style.

Katz is recognized for large-scale portraits and landscapes characterized by simplified forms, bold areas of color, crisp contours, and dramatic cropping. His subjects include friends, family, dancers, flowers, city scenes, and the Maine landscapes he has painted throughout his career. His wife, Ada, became one of his most frequently depicted subjects. Katz also pioneered painted cutouts in the late 1950s and has maintained an extensive printmaking practice.

Over more than seven decades, Alex Katz has exhibited internationally and his work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, and Tate. Major museum exhibitions include retrospectives and surveys at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, and MoMA. In 2023, Katz received the National Medal of Arts.