Alex Katz, Stephan Balkenhol

We are delighted to announce an exhibition of recent works by Alex Katz and Stephan Balkenhol, two influential artists who in different media continue to tackle the theme of the human figure in the 21st Century.

Alex Katz (1927* New York) is one of the most important painters of our time. In 2022 he will have career spanning retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Since the 1960s he has developed a highly innovative realist style unlike any of his contemporaries. Having appeared on the American artistic scene at the end of the ʻ50s, the years of Abstract Expressionism, and being a contemporary of Pop Art and the subsequent artistic movements, Katz surprisingly managed to reconcile the abstract movement with realism in US post war art, in a style that he himself defines as “totally American”. His final images are essential, luminous, and sharp, showing intense color planes, rendered in a particular bidimensional perspective, free of any sentimental connotation and yet able to communicate a profound emotional involvement.

By Katz we will present paintings and “cartoons” - large drawings made by the artist to transfer the images onto the canvas, using the same technique that Renaissance painters used to transfer the outlines of their frescos onto the walls. Next to these we will show charcoal drawings, that represent the first step of his creative path.

Stephan Balkenhol (1957* Fritzlar Hessen) since more than thirty years has been breathing new life into figurative sculpture with intense and original work. After leaving the Hamburg Academy, where he studied with the German minimalist sculptor Ulrich Rückriem, Balkenhol soon discovered his preference for wood as a material and his interest in wanting “to reinvent the figure”. He gouges them out of a tree trunk, and the traces left by the tools, branch notches and splits are left visible. Paint is used in a reduced form to structure the sculptures. Gestures, poses and facial expressions suggest both inner distance and an attentive openness towards the viewer. By turning to themes of everyday in his sculptures, relief and extensive installations, the artist has fathomed new aesthetic dimensions - also in the public domain and in the context of architecture - and thereby made new options available for contemporary sculpture.

We will show the large sculpture Female Herm, a woman’s bust created from three huge trunk sections, coming alive with intense, yet contained energy and grace - and other recent works.

Balkenhol has shown extensively in European and American galleries and museums. He has created many public works, among these a new Richard Wagner Memorial in Leipzig in May 2013; a large-scale presentation at the Church of Saint Elizabeth in Kassel in 2012 and a huge sculpture of a male torso shown at the Fori Imperiali in Rome in 2010. His works are in the collections of some of the most prestigious museums in the world, including the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.