Alex Katz exhibition opens at Parrish on February 7; family tour and workshop offered the same day

“Alex Katz: Seeing, Drawing, Making,” an exhibition of some 50 works in a wide range of materials and media, including preliminary sketches and drawings from the artist’s archive that have never before been exhibited, will open at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton on Sunday, February 7, and remain on view through April 4.

A reception on Saturday, February 6, will feature a conversation between Mr. Katz and Parrish Director Terrie Sultan at 6 p.m. in the museum’s concert hall, followed by wine and hors d’oeuvres. Admission to the reception is $7, or free for museum members.

“It’s not often that we have an opportunity to see how an artist works,” Ms. Sultan said in a statement, “but on this rare occasion a renowned artist shares his creative approach by providing access to rarely seen preliminary sketches, drawings, and cartoons. ‘Alex Katz: Seeing, Drawing, Making’ reveals how Katz evolves an original idea into a finished painting.”

The Parrish will host its winter Family Tour and Art Workshop in connection with the exhibition on Sunday, February 7, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Art educator Madolin Archer will conduct a tour of the exhibition, after which children and adults are invited to the Carroll Petrie Center for Education, adjacent to the museum, to create their own art work. In keeping with the exhibition’s focus on Mr. Katz’s working methods, the workshop will explore the creative process through painting and portraiture. Call 283-2118 to register.

Mr. Katz begins with a spontaneous drawing or rapid oil sketch that initially captures a motif, such as a dancer in full stride or a secluded landscape at sunset. He then elaborates the visual idea with successive pencil and ink drawings and large-format charcoal cartoons. In preparation for the final painting, the cartoon is affixed to the primed canvas and pounded, or punctured, with a tool that maps the charcoal outlines and leaves a set of perfect guidelines on the surface. These guidelines then become the basis for the painting, which the artist completes in one continuous session, working wet-on-wet.

In 1960, Mr. Katz and the noted choreographer Paul Taylor embarked on what has become a remarkably fruitful, decades-long working relationship. “Last Look,” a project developed in the mid-1980s resulting from that collaboration, offers a window onto Mr. Katz’s working method.

Throughout the exhibition, preparatory sketches and drawings hang alongside prints and finished paintings. These parings, not often presented in a museum setting, show not only the artist’s progression, but also how variations on the same subject, captured rapidly then fully rendered in different media, allow him to reach a commitment to the imagery that populates his paintings. While Mr. Katz may require only a full day or two to complete a painting, his final, concentrated act of painting is really just the last in a protracted series of engagements aimed at staking out the formal and emotional parameters of his subject matter.

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Mr. Katz studied at the Cooper Union in New York and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1954, when Abstract Expressionism held sway, but he turned to painting landscapes and the human figure. His large canvases embraced the scale and energy associated with Abstract Expressionism while anticipating the contemporary subjects and vernacular of Pop art.

“Appropriating the monumental scale, stark composition and dramatic light of the Abstract Expressionists, he would beat the heroic generation at their own game,” the critic Carter Ratcliff wrote in a 2005 monograph on Mr. Katz.

Mr. Katz has been included in many group and solo exhibitions, and his work can be found in almost 100 public collections worldwide. He divides his time between New York City and Lincolnville, Maine, where he has maintained a summer home since 1954. In 1992 he donated more than 400 of his works to the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz, one of the few wings of a museum in the United States devoted to the work of a single living artist, opened in 1996.

“Alex Katz: Seeing, Drawing, Making” was originally organized by David Moos, curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, for the Gallery at the Windsor, Vero Beach, Florida. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue distributed by DAP/Distributed Arts Publishers.

The presentation of “Alex Katz: Seeing, Drawing, Making” was made possible, in part, with generous support from Stacy and Douglas Polley, and Marcia and Jonathan Sobel.

The museum’s programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.