The Fondazione Giorgio Cini presents Claire, Grass and Water, an exhibition of new works by American artist Alex Katz, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and supported by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. The exhibition coincides with the 60th Venice Biennale and follows the artist’s recent landmark retrospective at the Guggenheim New York. It is conceived as a sitespecific intervention and spans three major groupings of never-before-seen works made between 2021 and 2022 that represent three key facets of Katz’s practice, the boundaries of which continue to expand seven decades into his career. Large-scale, close-up depictions of inky-hued oceans and of grassland in tones of greens and yellows are brought together in the Sala Carnelutti, followed in the Piccolo Teatro by a group of paintings based on outfits by mid-century American fashion designer Claire McCardell.

Coming of age as an artist in 1950s New York, Katz developed his unique approach to contemporary representational painting at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, he focused much of his attention on largescale landscape paintings that he characterises as ‘environmental’, the evolution of which can be seen in the new closely cropped, all-encompassing landscapes and waterscapes on view in the exhibition. As the artist says of these new paintings: ‘The closeup gives the painting much more power and energy. With the close-ups, I could make a realistic painting that could compete with a de Kooning or a Pollock.’ It was not until the 2010s that Katz began painting multiple tightly cropped portraits sequenced across the canvas as if in a strip of film, combining a variety of angles to create the impression of an ‘environmental’ portrait. For this exhibition, he has renewed this 1cinematic compositional logic by applying it to Claire McCardell’s celebrated designs, which are represented in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.