Curated by Michael Rooks

In his ninth decade, Alex Katz has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, but, as this show’s subtitle asserts, retrospection need not obviate contemporaneity. At the High, more than forty works created between 1954 (the year of Katz’s first public outing) and 2013 will draw our attention to the increasingly forthright place of landscape in his practice: What once served as background for his smoothly rendered figures had become a prepossessing subject in its own right by the 1980s. “This Is Now” highlights this shift. By bringing together fifteen large-scale landscapes of moonlit skies, pools of water, banks of snow, and dense fir groves, the exhibition promises a propitious opportunity to reconsider the attribution of realism to works that verge on abstraction despite—indeed, because of—imagery calibrated into expanses of pure color at environmental scale.

— Suzanne Hudson