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18/10/2011

Alex Katz / Banks Violette

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

Alex Katz

Face the Music

The American artist Alex Katz presents a new sequence of canvases, studies in oil, cartoons and drawings, all pertaining to dance. One of the undisputed key figures of American pop art, since the early 1950s — inspired by American billboards, the principle of seriality, and human representations, free of any kind of psychology — he was already preparing the way for pop art.

Although Alex Katz belongs to the pop generation of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it was not until the 1970s that his paintings were exhibited internationally. Since the 1980s, Katz has been a protagonist of Cool Painting, and one of the most influential painters worldwide. He came to be a regular father figure for an entire generation of young contemporary painters. Birth of the Cool was the title of an exhibition held in Zurich and Hamburg in 1997; it examined the way the musical coolness of American post-War jazz performed by musicians such as Stan Getz or Miles Davis became a new category in American painting.

Our exhibition also deals with the manifestation of music (and dance) in the media of painting and drawing. During the 1960s, Alex Katz collaborated for the first time with a dance ensemble. He created stage-sets for the legendary Paul Taylor Dance Company, and painted portraits of dancers and dance formations that were completely in tune with its time. In 2010 he returned to this theme, and painted portraits of the protagonists of the New York dance scene.

With his figurative pictures, Alex Katz has always been somewhere on the border between abstraction and realism. He was doing figurative paintings in American billboard format when the whole of American art had turned vehemently away from representation. Some painters persisted in their impulsive individual style or in the presentation of hardly perceptible differences; Katz countered these with his dry treatment of a visible, verifiable world. He was, he says, defending himself against abstract expressionism and the fervid self-representation of artists like Jackson Pollock. Werner Spies remarked in 2004 that the young painter was harking back, without any great detours, to America’s usable past — to Georgia O’Keeffe, Fairfield Porter, Ralston Crawford and Edward Hopper.

Katz’s works 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), the landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months every year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and New York society protagonists.

His work has been exhibited worldwide, in solo shows and retrospectives, and is included in the collections of many major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art/New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Tokyo, Tate Modern/London, Centre Georges Pompidou/Paris, Nationalgalerie/Berlin and Reina Sofia/Madrid.

A book will accompany the exhibition with texts by Mark Rappolt, editor-in-chief of the British magazine Art Review, and Charles Reinhart, director of the American Dance Festival.

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Banks Violette

Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children

Galerie Thaddeus Ropac present an exhibition of works on paper by New York artist, banks Violette.

Banks Violette is most well known for his sculptures and large-scale installations that often explore subcultural communities, in a stark, enigmatic yet minimal aesthetics. Violette’s references to different subcultures or other real-life stories of the dark side of American culture are often hidden behind the more formal aspects of the work.

The viewer, who engages in a theatrical relationship to the installations — often made of metal, mirror, neon, varnish and glass — is also charged with unearthing an array of uneasy truths contained in the sculpture.

For this exhibition, Violette has borrowed the title, Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children, from the 1991 LP of American hardcore punk band, Born Against, known for their radical leftist politics. The graphite drawings, presented on the first floor of the gallery, develop many of the themes already present in his oeuvre, namely ideas of violence, destruction, excess, loss and despair. The work titled Pick Your King/Amphetamine Overlord (2011) is a portrait of Jesus taken from hardcore punk band Poison Idea’s front cover album, which featured another “king”, Elvis Presley on the back cover.

A completely new aspect of Violette’s work comprises giving a sculptural dimension to his drawings by creating hand-made frames, whilst other drawings will be mounted on sheets of aluminum and propped against the wall.

Banks Violette was born in 1973 in Ithaca, New York; he lives and works in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2000 and previously studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has had important solo exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas (2008); the Kunsthalle in Bergen, Norway (2007); and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2005). He has also participated in major group shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Palais de Tokyo in 2008. And in 2006, at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich; the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Image: Alex Katz, Sara Mearns, 2011 Oil on linen — 84 × 120 in Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg

For press inquiries, please contact Alessandra Bellavita, alessandra@ropac.net

Opening Wednesday, October 19 at 6 PM
Hervé Robbe, French choreographer, will do a dance performance with Johanna Lemarchand with music composed by Romain Kronenberg at 8:30pm.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme - Paris
Opening hours Tuesday – Saturday, 10 AM – 7 PM

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