“Alex Katz: Theater and Dance” is a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s involvement with the performing arts, focusing on process and production.
Exploring process and partnership, La Jolla’s Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has opened “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance,” on view through Jan 4.
The exhibit, which begins with a smaller version of Katz’s “Bill 2,” which Murals of La Jolla hung at 7540 Fay Ave from 2019 to 2022, is a look at the works of Katz, 98 and still painting, “through one lens, through his contributions, partnerships and relationships with those in other arts disciplines,” said MCASD David C Copley Director and Chief Executive Kathryn Kanjo.
Paul Taylor Dance Company’s Sunset, set design by Alex Katz, 1983. (Photo by Johan Elbers)
The exhibition, the first comprehensive exploration of Katz’s collaborations with choreographers, dancers and members of avant-garde theater ensembles over six decades, showcases nearly 90 rare archival materials, major sets and paintings and previously unexhibited sketches from more than two dozen productions.
Katz emerged as an artist during abstract expressionism and has since cultivated an “ability to work across scale,” said MCASD associate curator Amy Crum.
The range of works in the new exhibit feature large-scale paintings, sketches, multi-dimensional pieces and more.
Notable, Crum said, is “the ways in which he’s so nimble at maneuvering between these different scales.”
The sketches displayed offer a “meditation on process,” she said, allowing the viewer to watch how Katz scales his works.
The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the American Federation of Arts and organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, spotlights 15 productions that Katz produced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, in a creative partnership that produced significant postmodern dance.
Visual artists engaging with theater or dance is “not necessarily a new or novel concept,” Crum said, “but what makes Katz distinct [in] his collaboration with Paul Taylor, is … there was a feedback or a continuous collaboration that went both ways between the two of them.”
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