At 95 years of age, Alex Katz continues to ride the ever-heightening crest of his career, most notably with the current highly acclaimed sweeping retrospective occupying the entirety of the Guggenheim Museum in his home town of New York City, alongside record-crushing sales at every leading auction house.

At times deceptively simple, Katz’s works are the product of a practice as involved and rich as any renaissance painter yet still contains the immediacy of song, commercial design, advertisement, and fashion — all of which Katz claims as sources of inspiration. The cool detachment of his restrained imagery built of “faster than you can think” flat planes of color is now recognized as a fundamental precursor of Pop Art, just one reason he is among the most cited artistic influences of the several generations of contemporary artists that succeed him.