When you're working with the tradition of art, you're usually painting like the paintings you've seen; your vision is other people's vision. You see things through the culture in which you live, and the culture in which you live is always past tense. Some people are always seeing things in another time period. To see things in the present time period, you have to break through, and that's what I've been trying to do.
Alex Katz
Katz's paintings are divided almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscape. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho) and landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months every year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and New York society protagonists.[12] His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment.[13] A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.[14]
In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Ada Katz, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of over 250[15] portraits throughout his career.[16] To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a masonite board; the sitting might take an hour and a half. He then makes a small, detailed drawing in pencil or charcoal, with the subject returning, perhaps, for the artist to make corrections. Katz next blows up the drawing into a "cartoon", sometimes using an overhead projector, and transfers it to an enormous canvas via "pouncing"—a technique used by Renaissance artists, involving powdered pigment pushed through tiny perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz pre-mixes all his colors and gets his brushes ready. Then he dives in and paints the canvas—12 feet (3.7 m) wide by 7 feet (2.1 m) high or even larger—in a session of six or seven hours.
“I never try to create real spaces—only painted spaces. That’s all I am interested in. That may be why there is never really any specifc time or place in my paintings.”
– Peter Doig
Alex Katz
Surface
Andreas Gursky
Art is not a record of reality, but an observation behind things
One of the most important figurative painters working today, Peter Doig is a master in hallucinatory scenes of magic realism. Born in Scotland but raised between Trinidad, Canada and London, the expansive, dream-like settings of Doig’s work reflect distinct chapters in his peripatetic life, imbuing the autobiographical with a universal appreciation for natural beauty and an uncanny twist.
Using found images – posters, magazine clippings, album covers and film stills – as well as his own memory, Doig’s paintings blur the distinction between reality and artifice. The landscapes he painted while studying at Chelsea College of Art for instance, were drawn from his childhood memories of Canadian wilderness, skiing over vertiginous peaks or walking through thick pine forests. Lacking the draftsmanship skills ordinarily associated with painting, photography provided Doig a way around the issue. Not only did painting from photographs come to define his process, it gave him the freedom to experiment with composition, to play with scale, colour and proportion in a way that heightened the otherworldly aura of his paintings.
Peter Doig
Essential culture, curated daily
Paris, Montparnasse, 1993 ©Andreas Gursky
Although Gursky captures the architectural and natural environment on a grand photographic scale. to present large-scale man-made landscapes with bright colors and rich details. But many of his dizzying repetitions of elements resemble forms or images in abstract paintings. It is ultimately about working towards a final end. I can learn a lot from this kind of surreal composition. The seemingly simple scenery, when deliberately planned, the power of the picture is impressive.
was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1962 he moved with his family to Trinidad, where his father worked with a shipping and trading company, and then in 1966 to Canada. He moved to London to study at the Wimbledon School of Art in 1979–1980, Saint Martin's School of Art from 1980 to 1983, and Chelsea School of Art, in 1989–1990, where he received an MA.[4] In 1989, the artist held a part-time job as a dresser at the English National Opera with his friend Haydn Cottam.[5]
Doig was invited to return to Trinidad in 2000, to take up an artist's residency with his friend and fellow painter Chris Ofili.[6] In 2002, Doig moved back to the island, where he set up a studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Centre near Port of Spain. He also became professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany.[7]
Gideon Rubin
collective memory
Gideon Rubin’s paintings are replete with dichotomy. Their subject matter, taken primarily from vintage photos and magazines, is unapologetically nostalgic – yet the work is not saccharine.
Austere and elemental, the palate is subdued, subtle, seemingly faded. Forms are reduced to a few sure brushstrokes that suggest rather than describe a figure or landscape. Identifying facial features are lost, rendered in a swirl or smudge of paint. Areas of the picture have had the paint scraped away or have never had pigment applied to the raw, natural-colored linen. Yet for paintings of such compositional economy, they luxuriate in the sensuality of oil paint. Rubin’s brushwork – energetic, thick and three-dimensional – is frankly joyful.
Figures of children, parents, a glimpse of landscape – with their lovingly rendered subjects, these paintings feel intimate. Viewing them might be a voyeuristic experience, but instead there’s a sense of familiarity. It’s like the memory of something that’s at the point of fading completely, or remembering a history that you were told about but never actually experienced first hand. Though these are another family’s pictures, they might have been your own. The insignificant moments represented are the stuff of collective memory – the minutiae that make up the meaningful part of our lives.
Gideon Rubin received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and a MFA from the Slade School of Art, London.
Gideon Rubin has had numerous international solo exhibitions; most recently: "The Sun Also Rises" at Ryan Lee Gallery (2021), 'Swing' at Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz (2021), "We Thought it Was Heaven Tomorrow" at Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney & Fox Jensen McCrory, Auckland (2021), "A Stranger's Hand" at Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris (2020), "Gideon Rubin" at Monica De Cardenas, Milan (2020), "Black Book' at the Jerusalem Artists' House (2020), "Warning Shadows" at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (2019), "Fragments' at Gallery EM, Seoul (2018), 'On the Far Side of the Mirror' at Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz (2018), 'The Kaiser's Daughter' at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco (2018), 'Black Book' at the Freud Museum, London (2018), 'Memory Goes as Far as this Morning' at Chengdu MoCA (2016), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art Israel and San Jose ICA (2015/16).