Alex Katz - Face the Music

In 1960, Alex Katz (born 1927) began to collaborate with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, commencing a relationship with dance that has spanned his entire career. Undertaken for the company’s performance of The Red Room (later known as Post Meridian ) at the legendary Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Katz’s contribution consisted of three enormous red panels that defined the stage, and round wooden discs capable of holding two dancers, which floated down from the top of the theater rafters. During the collaboration, Katz also made numerous portraits of both dancers and dances. Katz and Taylor collaborated again in the 1980s, but the painter has only recently returned to the depiction of dance, with a new series of portraits of leading figures in the New York dance scene. Alex Face the Music surveys Katz’s career-long involvement with dance, reproducing canvases, cartoons, drawings and studies in oil.