Artist: Alex Katz
Title: Sunrise
Medium: Lithograph in Colors
Size: 46" h x 34.625"
Year: 2021
Edition: 17/70
Published by: Graphicstudio, University of South Florida, Tampa
Inscription: Signed and numbered on front lower left
Documentation: Includes Gallery Certificate of Authenticity
Alex Katz's "Sunrise" (2021) exemplifies the artist's enduring exploration of light, color, and atmosphere through a distilled, contemporary lens. Created as a lithograph in colors and produced in collaboration with Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida, this work demonstrates Katz's ability to translate his iconic visual language into printmaking. Measuring over 46 inches in height, the composition commands attention through its large scale, immersing the viewer in its crisp clarity and serene mood.
As in much of Katz's work, "Sunrise" emphasizes reduction and immediacy. The composition captures the fleeting, transformative quality of early morning light through simplified forms and carefully calibrated hues. Katz strips the scene of extraneous detail, allowing the balance of color and shape to communicate atmosphere directly. The resulting image is both representational and abstracted, evoking an experience of perception more than a literal rendering of place.
Editioned at just 70 impressions, this lithograph underscores the artist's longstanding interest in serial imagery and the democratization of fine art through printmaking. Katz, who has worked across painting, sculpture, and graphic media for more than seven decades, has consistently pursued an economy of form that resonates with both intimacy and monumentality.
Signed and numbered on the front, "Sunrise" reflects Katz's continuing vitality as a major figure in contemporary art, even into his nineties. The work is a testament to his persistent engagement with the themes of light, landscape, and visual clarity that have defined his career.
About Alex Katz
Alex Katz (b. 1927) is an American painter widely recognized for his distinctive contributions to postwar art and his role in shaping a uniquely American form of contemporary realism. Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Queens, Katz grew up during the Depression era in a household that encouraged creativity. He studied at The Cooper Union in Manhattan from 1946 to 1949, where he was introduced to modernist ideas, before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Skowhegan's emphasis on painting directly from life proved pivotal, inspiring Katz's lifelong commitment to realism at a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world.
By the 1950s, Katz had begun to refine a visual style that set him apart from his contemporaries. His portraits, landscapes, and figure paintings were characterized by bold simplicity, flat expanses of color, and sharply defined contours. Rejecting the gestural abstraction of his peers, Katz pursued clarity and directness, producing works that were both modern and accessible. His early paintings of friends, family, and fellow artists anticipated the rise of Pop Art, though Katz resisted easy categorization.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Katz developed large-scale portraits that became central to his practice. His depictions often featured sitters in close-up, their expressions reserved, emphasizing surface and style over narrative psychology. These works reflected contemporary culture while maintaining a timeless quality, bridging fine art and popular aesthetics. Landscapes, another significant part of Katz's oeuvre, revealed his interest in light, atmosphere, and the immediacy of perception, often inspired by his summers in Maine.
Katz's career expanded significantly in the 1980s and beyond, as his monumental canvases and public commissions brought his imagery into new contexts. His works have been exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally, with major retrospectives organized by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Tate Modern in London. His art is represented in the permanent collections of leading museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Despite shifts in the art world, Katz has maintained a consistent vision, continuing to produce paintings, prints, and cut-out sculptures well into the 21st century. His economy of means—stripping images to their essential forms and colors—has influenced generations of artists and reinforced his position as a central figure in American contemporary art.
Today, Alex Katz is celebrated for a career spanning more than seven decades, marked by his unwavering pursuit of clarity, immediacy, and beauty in painting. His distinctive style, bridging realism and modernism, has secured his place as one of the most enduring and influential American artists of his era.
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