Alex Katz: Various Trees

5 Mar-11 Apr 2026

PV 5 Mar 2026, 6-8pm

Overview

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Various Trees, a presentation of new and recent studies by Alex Katz, bringing together a focused group of intimate landscape paintings made between 2023 and 2025. On view from 5 March through 11 April in London, the exhibition offers insight into the artist’s ongoing working process, foregrounding his sustained engagement with form, colour, and perception. Seventeen works capture with vivid clarity what Katz has described as “quick things passing,” affirming the continued immediacy and vitality of his practice.

Beginning in 2021, Katz increasingly turned his attention to painting his experiences of the natural world, capturing the ephemeral qualities of light on trees and the fleeting impression of drifting clouds over blossoms. At ninety-eight, the artist continues to pursue his desire to portray the phenomenological experience of such natural encounters—the sensations they evoke, rather than to gesture toward “realism.” Here, fourteen small-scale oil paintings on board are presented alongside three larger works on linen; all but one feature a cropped image of a tree—we see meandering limbs, stately trunks, and fragile twigs, all differently dappled with light and foliage. These scenes are fragments of landscapes the artist observed in New York City, near the studio where he has worked since 1968, and in Lincolnville, Maine, where he has summered since 1954. One painting from 2024, Study for Yellow Flowers (3), depicts yellow blooms suspended against a field of muted blue, as though flung skyward and pictured from below. 

This year, Timothy Taylor celebrates the gallery’s 30th anniversary, and this presentation—our fourteenth solo exhibition of the artist’s work—marks a return to our beginnings. In 2002, our first exhibition dedicated to Katz’s work featured small studies dating back to 1951. That presentation centred on Katz’s attention to the nuances of light and movement across landscapes and figures, an investigation that he has pursued with both remarkable continuity and variety for more than seven decades. In a 2024 interview for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Katz explained: 

“I think you have to keep changing the way you paint. And my painting, I think now is more conceptual and more automatic… you want to try to get to live, like Frank O’Hara says, ‘Live as variously as possible.’ And you want to paint as variously as possible, as much as you can.” 

In these latest works, the mottled patterns of light and shadow lean more heavily into abstraction, unrestrained in their movement between figure and ground. Vigorous swathes of colour express the exuberance of an early summer day, and harried daubs of white embody a frigid flurry of snow. These scenes, each like a brief passage of a much larger narrative, offer transportive glimpses into the artist’s profound engagement with nature and with seeing.

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