Upcoming Exhibition

Though titled after the hit television show about a resort hotel and the psychosocial relations of its guests and employees, White Lotus by Alex Katz bears no – or perhaps a mysterious – relation to HBO’s dark comedy. Opening at GRAY’s Chicago gallery on July 11, 2025, two weeks before the artist turns 98 years old, White Lotus is a testament not only to Katz’s nonstop creative output, but also his status as one of the most groundbreaking American artists of both the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Throughout his many years of relentless production, Katz has propelled American painting through his cool, flat depictions of figures and landscapes, and yet, he has also managed to avoid the pigeonholings of Pop, Realism, and Minimalism. As Calvin Tomkins noted in his 2018 profile of Katz for The New Yorker, “He has always had his own direction, which has not been the direction of mainstream art in any of the last seven decades.” This path has always been guided, in part, by the tools of cinema, through his use of monumental canvas, dramatic lighting, and repeating figures.  

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 beachgoing figures, a man and a woman, with three different pairs depicted. 

Closely cropped onto the figures’ faces and torsos – a technique partly inspired by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni – the paintings contain enigmatic atmospheres, alternating between tension and sensuality, delivered in Katz’s signature brushstroke: broad and dispassionate, a seamless marriage of representation and abstraction. As curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete notes in his essay for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, the figures “aren’t really meant to be ‘people,’ but symbols instead – though symbols of what, exactly, remains eerily, satisfyingly unresolved, frozen in the blinding glare of New England’s summer light.” 

Alex Katz: White Lotus opens at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue with a public reception on Friday, July 11 from 5-7PM, and will be on view through September 20, 2025 

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION
Alex Katz: White Lotus is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete, Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at University of Chicago.