BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Alex Katz. This Is Now , a show that explores the development of landscape in the artist’s career over the last 25 years. Organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the exhibition features 35 works in which Katz sought to convey the appearance of things as they are both felt and perceived in the ―present tense,‖ the now.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn) is a painter whose work is both fixed in the canon of postwar American art and in the avant garde of painting today. He emerged in the 1950s as a figurative painter in an age of abstraction, challenging critics who shunned imagery in art, especially figuration. Although he rejected Abstract Expressionism’s abandonment of imagery, Katz did embrace its energy and formal logic. He developed a fast, physically active painting inspired by the action art of Jackson Pollock, whose allover compositions were a revelation. Katz described his goal as the pursuit of capturing ―quick things passing‖ in his work.

Using a shallow pictorial space and lean, reductive, but acutely descriptive lines, Katz aims to initiate a conversation about the confluence of perception and awareness, as well as the relationship between art and nature and the nature of the sublime in this contemporary moment. Although best known for his portraits, Katz has painted landscapes both inside the studio and outof-doors since the beginning of his career.

The Figure and the Landscape
Maine’s landscape has remained a touchstone of Katz’s work since 1949, and the disciple of pleinair painting he learned there in the summer months led him to paint outside during the fall, winter, and spring months in Manhattan. City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan is the subject of his work January 3.

Katz’s wife, Ada, whose portrait appears in the center of this tripartite image, has been one of his most enduring subjects since they met in 1957. The bright colors of her hat and lipstick are set against a cool, wintry image of City Hall Park. Her enlarged and cropped image appears in the work like a jump-cut in film, disrupting the linear flow of time and the pictorial space of the painting.

The Present Tense
Katz is interested in seizing the instant moment of perception in painting rather than faithfully rendering images. He describes this moment as an explosive ―flash‖ just before the image comes into focus and calls it ―the present tense.‖ In the painting 10:30 am , for example, Katz transforms the instant moment of seeing a stand of birch trees animated by dappled sunlight into an enveloping, epic experience.

Katz’s formal economy is essential to his notion of the present moment. The contours of his lines and juxtaposition of forms are exactingly deliberate and the result of modifying compositions while enlarging them several times over in the studio. By refining and calibrating the original composition over the course of months, Katz arrives at a direct, abbreviated, and concentrated image.

However, the artist describes his style as having roots in abstraction. Indeed, his paintings are characterized by allover compositions that appear to be spontaneous, recalling the gestural painting style generally associated with artists like Jackson Pollock. But Katz predetermines the composition of his paintings, giving him the freedom to use paint in a rapid, physical manner in pursuit of that ―present tense.‖

Flower Paintings
In a 1968 interview, Katz described his paintings of flowers as an extension of the cocktail party scenes he often painted. He remarked that the flowers are ―all overlapping volumes,‖ like the individuals in his figure groupings, which overlap one another as they advance into the pictorial space. Indeed, the fundamental subjects of Katz’s landscape paintings are form, surface, space, and light as they are subsumed in nature.

There is a physically dynamic sense of movement in Katz’s landscape paintings akin to dance, inviting the viewer to adapt to the pace of the work according to his or her own frame of mind and emotional bearing. Light and form provide an unexpected syncopation of movement across the surface of his flower paintings. Painted rapidly and assuredly, wet into wet, the flowers oscillate between states of awkwardness and grace typically associated with the human body. Katz’s roses, with their fleshy petals and serrated leaves, are aggressive and fierce, belying the congenial association that flowers typically summon.

“5 Hours”
The video 5 Hours —filmed and directed by Katz’s son, poet and art critic Vincent Katz, and his daughter-in-law, photographer and filmmaker Vivien Bittencourt—documents the creation of the painting January 3 , included in this exhibition. It shows the artist at work on this large landscape painting, divided into three sections: a portrait of his wife, Ada, fills the central section and is flanked on each side by winter scenes.

The film documents Katz’s athletic manner of painting. He begins with a canvas onto which a fullscale drawing, or cartoon, has been transferred—a technique developed during the Italian Renaissance that fixes the final composition and allows Katz to paint swiftly. As the film’s title suggests, the entire painting is finished in a mere five hours.

Black Brook Paintings
For more than 20 years during summers in Maine, Katz has returned to paint a modest stream near his studio and home. Works from the Black Brook series vary in scale, from the small and intimate to the monumental and enveloping. Many of them show the cropped reflection of the neighboring landscape on the brook’s surface, thus inverting its image. Through this spatially ambiguous motif, Katz effectively refers to the phenomenon of perception, whereby images are inverted as they pass through the cornea but perceived right-side up by the brain.

The extreme horizontality of Black Brook 16 is broken by a series of staccato strokes painted vertically across the canvas, along with bubbles that seem to be either floating on or reflected in the water’s surface. The fat but faint brushstrokes representing tree trunks along the banks of the brook seem like apparitions, markers of memory that punctuate the work’s impenetrable darkness.

My Mother’s Dream
This immense painting summarizes Katz’s formal and poetic language. Consisting of four views of the same scene at different but non-consecutive moments during twilight, the painting suggests a jump backward or forward in time. This composition creates a structural logic, similar to a poetic meter or musical rhythm, while establishing a sequence of spatial expansion and compression across the canvas’s surface. Despite these temporal and formal intervals, the pictorial field of My Mother’s Dream feels limitless. This, combined with the painting’s sheer architectural enormity, invites reflection, association, and memory, absorbing the viewer emotionally. Katz summons the breadth of his technical virtuosity and keen powers of perception, expressing them powerfully and evocatively through the confluence of perception and memory.

Sunset and Twilight
The paintings Sunset and Twilight , both covered in black with passages of fiery red and turquoise, respectively, exemplify Katz’s superlative handling of color relationships. Painted with confident bravado, Twilight captures the fleeting moment of the moon shining through the canopy of a pine forest.

In Sunset 1 and Sunset 3 , Katz strives to capture a precise moment when the continually changing and evanescent light of the setting sun passes behind a stand of pine trees. The subtle differences between the paintings which share the same composition lie in the gradient bands of color, and the downward movement of the heavy tree branches silhouetted against the sky, underscoring both the immediacy and mutability of perception.