Alex Katz is an American figurative artist born in Brooklyn in 1927 and raised in Queens, known for large-scale paintings whose flat planes of color and bold simplicity are widely seen as precursors to Pop Art. Trained at Cooper Union (1946-49) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (1949-50), he divides his work between portraiture, including more than 250 portraits of his wife Ada, and landscapes of New York and Maine, where he has summered in Lincolnville since 1954; he maintains a loft in SoHo, Manhattan. Katz has had more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows since 1951, including a 2022-23 retrospective at the Guggenheim, and his work is held in over 100 public collections including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate. He is also a prolific printmaker, with more than 400 print editions.