Alex Katz - Coca-Cola Girls Prints (2019)

“Paintings are like wine. Sometimes it travels and sometimes it doesn’t.”

The Coca Cola Girls portfolio is an excellent example of Alex Katz's work influenced by pop culture and advertising. Between the 1890s and the 1960s, images of bold and even daring girls were an integral part of Coca-Cola's advertising, created to show an idealized American woman. Originally discreet and modest, the Coca-Cola Girls gradually changed during World War I with the advent of the pin-up aesthetic to images of confident female soldiers in uniform and sporty women in casual clothing.

These images were essentially pre-television commercials, so they naturally had a tremendous cultural and social impact on the imagery of the American urban landscape. Alex Katz explains this phenomenon by saying, "Ultimately, these works address an important aspect of American history, as they deconstruct inherited cultural and economic narratives in terms of the present moment."

Alex Katz's paintings reflect choreographic movements of the female body, synchronized with the manual application of paint based on a Renaissance technique called "pouncing," used to transfer an image from one surface to another. This type of thorough brushwork is a demanding physical process and requires repetition, which Katz loves so much.

The homogeneous and strong red in the background contrasts wonderfully with the white swimsuits of the exceptionally attractive ladies and thus creates the signal effect that is desired in advertising.

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About Alex Katz

As a pioneer of Pop Art, Alex Katz always concentrated on the essentials and began to explore simplified forms and high-contrast color compositions at an early age. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he was born in New York on July 24, 1927, and lives and works in New York and Lincolnville (Maine). His family inspired him to be interested in fine art from an early age.

Katz is best known for his figurative, two-dimensional paintings, which have been the subject of numerous exhibitions in recent years. In addition to large-format landscapes and flower paintings, these often document the people and social events that immediately surround the artist himself.

Katz's family members or friends are often the subjects of his pictures, which he depicts using visual techniques previously only known from film and advertising, such as repeating scenes or cropping images. Since the beginning of his creative phase, Katz has repeatedly portrayed his wife Ida Katz, as well as numerous petunia flower formations. These are among his main works, along with Spring Flowers, Yellow Flags and Wildflowers. The graphic "White Petunia" from 1969 is in the permanent collection of the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art New York) and the MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art New York).

Axel Katz can now look back on more than 200 solo and around 500 group exhibitions and numerous awards such as the “Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum”.

His works have been part of numerous exhibitions worldwide and always focus on the beauty of the motifs. He is always concerned with depicting the immediate present - the brief, unknowing moment in which you look at something without thinking. With his pictures he tries to capture the visual as it hits the eye in a brief moment.