Alex Katz — Sculpture For Sale

Alex Katz's Sculpture series extends his signature figuration into three-dimensional space, translating the flat, graphic economy of his paintings into freestanding painted forms. The series originates in what Katz called his "cutouts," a format he arrived at almost by accident in 1959, when he cut a figure out of a painting he was dissatisfied with and mounted it on a shaped plywood panel rather than discard the canvas.

The earliest cutouts were painted canvas fixed to contoured wood; within a few years Katz began painting directly onto the shaped wood itself, and by the 1960s he had shifted to painting straight onto sheets of aluminium cut with a power saw — a technique he has continued for decades. Removing the traditional rectangular canvas edge, the format allows a figure to exist as an object in real space rather than as an illusion confined within a frame, standing freestanding on the floor or projecting from the wall.

The cutouts quickly moved beyond the studio into wider culture: in 1962, Harper's Bazaar commissioned Katz to produce cutouts for a four-page fashion spread, an early and unusual crossover between his fine art practice and commercial fashion imagery. Across six decades, the Sculpture series has remained a distinct strand of Katz's work, carrying his cool, pared-down mark-making and observational precision into an object-based, sculptural register that sits alongside his celebrated paintings and prints.