American Art Collaborative

In 1959, Alex Katz cut away the ground of a painting around two figures and mounted their silhouettes onto a wooden board, thus beginning his body of work known as “cutouts.” Eventually painted directly onto sheets of aluminum and often created as stand-alone pieces, these cutouts assert themselves within the viewer’s immediate space. The portraits in Wedding, a group of cutouts joined by a perpendicular plane, occupy a shared space, but the work is also self-contained. The title provides the only context for an otherwise ambiguous crowd of individuals and groups of figures that overlap without interacting. This peculiarity of this compilation of figures comes forth in the work’s unusual use of scale: Katz depicts portrait busts as being larger than full-sized bodies. –Leah Bilodeau ’17