Street Lights

Solitary orbs of blazing light warm Alex Katz’s Street Lights, a soaring hymn to urban darkness. From a rich, emotive blackness emerges a New York City skyscraper, whose outline is discernible only by the glow of streetlamps and a few illuminated windows. Despite such a restricted colour palette, Katz conjures a poignant urban nightscape whose simplified geometries exude the solitude and silence of a late-night stroll. Born in Brooklyn, Katz has called New York City home ever since, and Street Lights is a tender tribute to his hometown. For the artist, light has always been the most important subject: ‘light is the initial flash of what you see,’ Katz has said. ‘That’s what I’m after’ (A. Katz, quoted in Alex Katz: Quick Light, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2016, p. 14). Like the Impressionists before him, Katz looks to light’s transitory qualities, endeavouring to capture its mercurial, ephemeral traces across both faces and landforms. In 1986, following an extensive body of work dedicated to daylight, Katz cast his eyes towards the darker hours: ‘There are so many kinds of daylight and nightlight,’ he said. ‘I thought they should get equal attention’ (A. Katz quoted in Alex Katz: New York/Maine, Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, 2013, p.18). Katz has always charted his own artistic path: resisting the Modernist aesthetics which dominated the discourse of his youth, he instead turned to figuration, rendering the everyday discoveries of his life in swathes of expressive colour. Small moments occupy Katz, which he renders monumental and imbues with significance. Bathed in fluorescence, Street Lights is the commonplace made extraordinary, fleeting yet significant, the vestiges of an inhabited life.