REVIEW: Alex Katz, "White Lotus," at GRAY Chicago
Alex Katz, White Lotus, 2025, GRAY Chicago, PC Evan Jenkins. Courtesy GRAY, Chicago/New York. Artwork © Alex Katz Studio/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
REVIEW
Alex Katz, White Lotus
GRAY Chicago
2044 W Carroll Ave
Chicago, IL 60612
July 11 – September 20, 2025
By Kristin Mariani
“It was precisely by photographing and enlarging the surface of things that I tried to discover what was behind them. I’ve done nothing else in my career.” —Michelangelo Antonioni
Upon entering GRAY Chicago to view Alex Katz’s White Lotus, my gaze is parted by a blue sea of large horizontal paintings and two sections of folding chairs, set up church-like, that merge into a small distant painting hung in an alcove due north of the entrance. This double framed painting, Study for White Lotus, provides a snapshot to a doubling of two subjects—a couple rendered twice—a white skinned, brown-haired man and woman. He is bearded and balding in a white t-shirt. She is neatly coiffed in a cropped bob wearing an aqua-blue sleeveless top that matches the landscape. In this seaside social scene, a moment is doubled against a single horizon line which vanishes in the extended sequence of enlarged paintings that bracket it.
My viewing of White Lotus coincides with a Portable Gray book release event commemorating artist Pope.L, who died in December of 2023. White Lotus curator Dieter Roelstaete is present, spinning a collection of Pope.L’s records as the audience enters the gallery. In his opening remarks as a contributor to the Portable Gray publication, Pope.L: The Chicago Years, he states that this event—held in honor of the ground-moving and transgressive black artist—takes place enclosed by representations of whiteness in Katz’s paintings. The audience at the Pope.L event is surrounded by a sea of white gazes, not unlike Monica Viti is surrounded by a siege of male gazes in a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film, L’Avventura. At 98 years old, Katz cites Antonioni as an inspiration, something shared by the HBO series White Lotus, with a direct reference to the postwar Italian filmmaker’s famous scene in episode 3 of season 2. This complex correspondence in social tensions taking place at GRAY Chicago weighs on the tautness of social relations in Katz’s paintings.
What is white in this exhibition?
The title is white.
The subjects are white.
Some shirts are white.
Everyone is exposed.
The figures in these paintings are separated into pairs, painted with yellow, khaki, pink, grey, and brown skintones, depending on their exposure to the sun. Viewing the works clockwise from the west wall of the gallery, White Lotus 4, White Lotus 1, and White Lotus 11 depict overlapping couples. Each couples’ proximity to the viewer is pronounced, while their proximity to each other is questionable. In the next canvas, White Lotus 3, distance is increased. A woman with long blond hair, parted straight down the middle with a thick brushstroke, looks directly at the viewer wearing classic round “John Lennon” sunglasses. The man she is overlapped with in White Lotus 1, turns away as if looking at the next painting in the series. In this frame, White Lotus 2, the positions are reversed; A woman in the foreground with short dark hair closes her eyes before the viewer, as a bearded man in the background directs his sunglassed gaze to the back of her head.
Alex Katz, (b. 1927), White Lotus 3, 2023. Oil on linen 48 x 72 inches; 121.9 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy GRAY, Chicago/New York. Artwork © Alex Katz Studio/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
What is the configuration of this conversation on the east wall of the gallery? In one painting, White Lotus 5, the woman in the aqua-blue shirt is compositionally more cornered by the bearded man behind her. In White Lotus 6, the subjects are looking at something, but not at each other. The unbudging couple from White Lotus 3 reappears in White Lotus 8 with a simple turn of his head. The same pair of figures compositionally switch between foreground and background in White Lotus 10, and White Lotus 7. The subjects are seeing and being seen. Fashion presents itself not by what the subjects are wearing, so much as their awareness that they are being seen—by each other and the exhibit viewers. Their faces are dressed surfaces. All lips are sealed in the conversation. Every figure in the eleven paintings is rendered mute, with a single stroke of Katz’s paintbrush closing each mouth like a horizon line. Can a painting have self-awareness?
Katz's paintings seem to have it.
Alex Katz, White Lotus, 2025, GRAY Chicago, PC Evan Jenkins. Courtesy GRAY, Chicago/New York. Artwork © Alex Katz Studio/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Each painting holds a tension that moves across the white walls. The sequence of Katz's eleven enlarged paintings is arranged like a graphic novel, or more specifically, the cinematic form embraced by Michelangelo Antonioni and a generation of postwar Italians— the photo novel or fotoromanzo—where photos, rather than illustrations, create a visual narrative. Katz’s paintings seem to crop and enlarge a snapshot inside of a snapshot. Each canvas connects and disconnects from what shapes the content of the next, and how one will see it, or not see it, in the frame. These paintings suspend an in-between moment that in today's smart phone photography might likely be deleted, revealing awkward instants when subjects are not quite settled into their positions, rendered nearly expressionless, masked in paint.
“Art does not get better in time. It just changes like fashion.” -—Alex Katz
Representations of clothing often provide a sense of a subject’s place in time, however there's nothing in the clothing of Katz’s White Lotus that reveals the date of his source imagery. The garments worn by the figures are casual, detailed in a vague timelessness with his specific economy of line—A white t-shirt, a blue v-neck top, a shawl collar cardigan. All garments are rendered textureless, in the same flatness as the blue sky around them. These subjects could be dressed at any point in time between 1960 and today. Katz started exhibiting his paintings in 1954—the same year he bought his beach-side home in Maine and started photographing his subjects. Consider how social relations, and the production of both fashion and image has shifted across the post-war period, and the experimental expanse of the painter’s oeuvre across this time period. Katz made all these works in 2023. These paintings are not about these subjects. It’s about what is behind them.
There's a stillness in space and time that a painting and its dried pigment seals in a way that a photo does not. There is no vanishing point, no merging of the gazes in these paintings. It's pointlessly touching.
Everyone is concealed by what is seen.
Kristin Mariani is an artist, Couture Editor of Bridge, and Founder of RedShift Couture.
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