Ada, Late Summer

Alex Katz’s painting reads like a summer snapshot—his wife, Ada, posing on Lincolnville Beach in Maine, the family’s favorite holiday retreat. Yet Katz’s large-scale oil painting does away with photographic realism, reducing the image to a set of broad, flat shapes that verge on complete abstraction. As Katz has explained, “Style and appearance are the things I’m more concerned about than what something means…. I prefer [my works] to be emptied of meaning, emptied of content.” Though the image depicts a beloved wife smiling, the treatment is coolly detached, as Katz moves beyond everyday sentiment to investigate the complexities of perception itself.