Painted in 2023, the year of the artist’s celebrated Guggenheim retrospective, the paintings in this exhibition do not depict characters or scenes from The White Lotus television show – in fact, Katz has only watched part of a single episode. Known for painting people close to him – most notably his wife Ada, son Vincent, and daughter-in-law Vivien – the figures painted by Katz in this suite are strangers by comparison. They are based on photographs he took while on a beach in Maine, where Katz has kept a summer home since 1954. Each of the eleven paintings in White Lotus portray two beach-going figures, a man and a woman, with three different pairs depicted.

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Alex Katz (American, b. 1927) is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

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Since the 1950s, Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2024, Katz received a National Medal of Arts.