Art Gallery Shows to See in November
by Andrew Russet

The revealing Matthew Barney video at the entrance of this thrilling show starts with a 96-year-old Alex Katz strolling through his SoHo studio, past elegant paintings of flowers and a woman, subjects by which he made his name. Then he grabs a stepladder and gets to work on one of the 11 tough and very different pictures now on view at Gladstone. 
 
They are enormous (10 feet by 8 feet or so), and they are almost entirely two colors, orange atop white. Painted in 2024, most are disorientating near-abstractions, but their titles provide guidance. The receding orange plane in “Road 22” could very well be a path, with a couple of trees in the distance, though “Road 28” is just dozens of white shards in a field of orange, and “Road 27” is the opposite.
 
Narrow yellow lines hug some of these forms, as they do in Henri Matisse’s “Red Studio” (1911), a foundational influence for the series, Katz says in an accompanying text. Barney’s intimate footage documents the artist from multiple angles as he adds orange to a white canvas already holding yellow strokes, following a rugged blueprint.
 
In the most straightforward piece, an orange horizon with a gable-roofed house glides across white. It’s the only bland work here, but it grounds Katz’s gallant pursuit. Depicting a road at his longtime summer home in Maine, he is honing a language that is new and strange, turning the familiar into something richly symbolic, and at times disquieting.
 
Other late-career surprises come to mind, like Willem de Kooning’s airy pictures of the 1980s, and Cy Twombly’s blazing swirls of color around 2010. Katz’s compositions are more taut and trickier, though: austere but luminous, aggressively serene. Orange is “dissonant” and “abrasive,” Katz says, approvingly, in that text. These fractured, searching and very beautiful works have signs of both harmony and struggle, evincing an artist still in the fight.