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FRANK FLUEGEL GALERIE |
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Frank FlĂŒgel |
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Obere Wörthstrasse 12 |
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90403 NĂŒrnberg |
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Deutschland |
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+49 (0) 1728120255 |
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Die Adresse der Ausstellung lautet:
GALERIE FRANK FLUEGEL
Obere Wörthstrasse 12
Tel.: +49 (0) 1728120255
90403 NĂŒrnberg
Beschreibung der Ausstellung:
Im Juni eröffnet Galerie Frank Fluegel an den beiden Standorten
NĂŒrnberg und KitzbĂŒhel die neue Ausstellung Alex Katz "Coca Cola
Girls".
Alex Katz wird am 24. Juli 2019 92 Jahre alt. Der bisherige
Auktionsrekord fĂŒr eines seiner Bilder liegt bei 850.000 GBP und ist
damit noch weit entfernt von den Preisen seiner amerikanischen
Kollegen wie Tom Wesselmann oder Andy Warhol.
GALERIE FRANK FLUEGEL mit Standorten in NĂŒrnberg und KitzbĂŒhel
ist fokussiert auf hochwertige Originale der Pop Art, Street Art und
Zeitgenössischen Kunst von Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Keith
Haring, Mr. Brainwash, BAMBI, XOOOOX, Roy Lichtenstein, Julian
Opie, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Sean Scully, Robert Longo, Alec
Monopoly, Tracey Emin, Peter Doig, Alex Katz oder Mel Ramos.
Als einzige Galerie in Deutschland haben wir alle Mel Ramos Grafiken
zur Ansicht vorrÀtig, auch Àltere und lÀngst vergriffene Exemplare
wie AC Annie oder Cohiba.
In regelmĂ€Ăigem Wechsel finden Ausstellungen im zentral gelegenen
GeschÀft in der Oberen Wörthstrasse 12 statt. Internationale
Messeteilnahmen runden das Programm ab.
Viele der angebotenen Werke können Sie sofort kaufen und
mitnehmen, da diese lagernd sind. Bitte beachten Sie, dass bei
manchen KĂŒnstlern aufgrund der hohen Nachfrage mit steigender
Preisentwicklung zu rechnen ist, Werke im Preis steigen können und
alte Preise damit Ihre GĂŒltigkeit verlieren.
Galerie Frank FlĂŒgel
Obere Wörthstrasse 12
90403 NĂŒrnberg
https://www.frankfluegel.com
REDâa long-drawn-out, intense red, monochrome through and
through. This saturated, warm red unfolds its very own effect, a
lasting presence. Hear Coca‑Cola, and you see red. This red is
dominant, powerful, melodic, and permeated by an infinite number
of pigments that weave an impenetrable dense network of surfaces
that will allow nothing less than pure color timbre. In its entire
extent, this becomes the resonance chamber for the white
typography of the double word Coca-Cola. The new series Coca-Cola
Girl by Alex Katz, the master of the game between figuration and
abstraction, also manages with this equally simple color chord. It
combines much of what makes up Alex Katzâs art: his unpretentious
coolness and lasciviousness, a few suggestive narrative elements
that are only very loosely related in individual sequences. All this
conjures the fascination and joy of summer and carefreeness.
Subtly, he processes ideas and elements that tie in with the
advertising strategies of the major global brand, but without actually
quoting them. In a sequence of eleven motifs, he creates his own
style of narrative, which he recites with his individual imagery that is
as striking, illustrative, and subtle as it is unapproachable.
With the Coca-Cola Girl Alex Katz turns to a global advertising label
which had developed like no other by the beginning of the twentieth
century to what was then the sole worldwide brand. To this day it
embodies the attitude to life of generations, forms a link across
states and cultures, and enjoys international cult status pure and
simple. Interestingly enough, this applies not just to the drink itself,
but from the beginning, also to the design of the product. Never
before had a âcorporate designâ been given so much attention when a
product was placed on the American market as was the case with
Coca-Colaâa design which has remained true to itself, with few
modifications: with its catchy logo, the eponymic name, which
immediately indicates what the drink consists of. All this testifies to a
message that is as simple as it is stringent and convincing. The
name, which is derived from the two main components (coca leaf
and kola nut), was merged by the two initial Cs into a lively logo in
the Spencerian script which is still used today . The similarity of the
two words creates an alliteration that is as easily memorable as it is
uncomplicated. The now classic red of the logoâs base color is said to
have come from the bottling barrels and was used for the very first
newspaper ad on May 29, 1886 in the Atlanta Journal. It is a very
special saturated hue with a high proportion of red, (1) which is
inseparably associated with the product: âThe color has become a
promise.â (2)
The logo developed at that time emerged as a constant eye-catcher
âubiquitously in the advertising and on the product itselfâand used
everything needed for success even in todayâs product promotions:
simple in the typography, appealing and positive in the message.
The large-scale advertising strategy focused on the memorable logo
as well as on pithy, catchy advertising slogans that praised the drink.
Soon, cinema and television advertising was added: here, where the
corporation, now the owner of a global brand, increasingly paid
attention to a rousing soundtrack. More and more frequently, stars
from the music scene or the world of sports were, and are, engaged
to put across the positive attitude to life that the brand seeks to
convey. The advertising professionals evoke a lively feeling that is
modern, confident and positive, embodying both male and female
philosophies of life; they have cleverly created one of those brands
that come across as classless and ageless.
Coca-Cola has been the absolute cult drink for more than 130 years,
something which would be unthinkable without intensive marketing.
The rapid rise of Coca‑Cola is said to be due to the intense
advertising strategy under Asa Candlerâs leadership; back in 1888 he
acquired the rights to the mixture and set aside an unusually high
advertising budget for the time. Thus even in 1900 he was spending
85,000 dollars, and by 1912 no less than a million. (3) With his
marketing he struck out along new paths, sending for example, sales
reps all over the country; they were told to praise Coca-Cola and
other wonder drugs with basically unsustainable promises of cure. In
the cities, advertising was aimed at business people, with Candler
promising âA Coke at 8 works till 11.â The slogan still in use, âDrink
Coca-Cola,â also dates from this time. Primarily responsible for the
advertising at this time was Frank Robinson, who had joined Candler
and initiated a turnaround in 1905. He launched the image of Coca-
Cola as a soft drink under the slogan âDelicious and Refreshing.â The
beverage was coming under attack from consumer organizations on
account of its alleged cocaine and caffeine content, so it helped to
label it in advertising as absolutely âpure,â âinvigorating,â and as an
alternative to medicine.
At the turn of the century, female beauties were used in advertising
for the first time, the actress Hilda Clark, for example, and the
blonde opera singer Lillian Nordica being hired for the ads. The first
advertisement with Hilda Clark was launched in 1903, staging her as
an upper-class girl with pink rose petals, a lush frilly blouse, and a
Coca-Cola drink in a silvered tea glass. (4) At first, the drink was
presented as a precious rarity, on which the beautiful woman was to
bestow a special gloss of nobility and cultivation. With the soprano
Lillian Nordica too, who appeared in the major opera houses, the
company advertised across the board, concentrating its image in the
fashion magazines that proliferated all over the United States: âIn
1905, Nordica appeared in a full color magazine ad that was
published in leading magazines of the time including Good
Housekeeping, Munseyâs Magazine and Scribnerâs Magazine.â (5)
Here she is presented as a grand diva, in lush robe and with a large
feather fan, and unmistakably a Coca-Cola bottle stands on its own
pedestal (fig. 1). While in Hilda Clarkâs time the drink had not had
cult status, it seems to have achieved this by 1905, and was staged
as such. The stardom of the singer Lillian Nordica was cleverly linked
to the popular beverage, which as a result of massive advertising
and a low price was ever more quickly becoming the drink a mass
leisure society wanted. To date, the link forged between Coca‑Cola
and beautiful women (and men) has remained the benchmark of
advertising strategy and success.
Alex Katz loves fashionâbut the casual sporty kind. He is one of the
few great artists to have no reservations about associating himself
with famous labels and their advertising. He is thus in the direct
tradition of Pop Art, which for its part gladly adopted the
mechanisms of advertising, its visuals, and the phenomenon of mass
influence. Remember Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy
Warhol in particular, with his soap quote in the Brillo Boxes, the
Campbell Soups, and the media celebrity-cult he re-energized in the
1963 Double Elvis silkscreen. Alex Katz, however, cannot be directly
assigned only to Pop Art, and does not simply use Cola advertising
with its unmistakable logo; rather, he builds up a completely unique
image strategy that is at most remotely reminiscent of it, without,
however, quoting it (so to speak) verbatim. Only his painting â
supple, melodic, strident and yet highly nuanced in its color
composition â oscillates between narrative elements, the
simplification of painterly and compositional structures, and an
imagery that reduces itself to abstraction, so that at first glance it
does indeed recall advertising posters. In fact, it often suggests a
representation of what has been seen and experienced, while
developing an abstraction thereof, working with references and
quotations. When viewed in the light, it already contradicts the very
idea of imitation or copyâeven as an ironic gesture.
Alex Katz takes a fundamentally different approach, even when heâs
into Calvin Klein fashion, or when in 2015 he designed the entire,
gigantic window façade of Barneyâs New York department store as
one big catwalk, using it to present huge oversize black-and-white
prints (fig. 2, page over). Especially in black-and-white he abstracts
even more intensively, everything is reduced to a few lines and
succinct motifs. They are indirectly reminiscent of his numerous cut-
outs, which sometimes reflect life situations and sometimes push
fashion toward a natural situation taken from everyday life. The
more strongly the simplification leads to abstraction, the more
complex is Katzâs painterly approach. The lightness of the painting
may at first distract from the actual complexity, which however
becomes clear in the long term: âAs in much of Katzâ oeuvre, the
figures exist not as characters in a narrative but rather as
manifestations of his ongoing exploration into formal arrangement,
interrogating the particularities of perception and optics.â (6)
It is also inseparable from this that Alex Katz prefers to show his
models and sitters in motion, if only in the sense that a dress or a
scarf flutters in the wind. The movement creates elegance and
lightness. It underlines the naturalness and often the carefreeness
that animates all its protagonists. Not least, this may be due to his
intense involvement with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, for whom
he has designed costumes and sets for nearly thirty years. (7)
Flowing, elegant movements fascinate Alex Katz, (8) and fashion
underscores this, as can be seen in the numerous close-up-portraits
with large hats and the figure‑hugging leotards or swimsuits. As
early as 1977 Alex Katz produced a large-format painting, Round
Hill, in which he portrayed his family and friends in swimwear on the
beach: a composition in which he captures the everyday scene as
though in a snapshot, but at the same time lending it a strident
painterly rigor, dispensing with anything unnecessary. A few years
later, Katz painted a four-part series of large canvases in which he
again introduced women in bathing suits and bathing caps:
âEleuthera, from 1984, is at first sight even more perplexing: four
canvases of women in swimming costumes and caps, looking out at
us with serene, but blank expressions like a set of 1930s fashion
illustrations blown up to huge size.â (9)
When Alex Katz got involved with the global brand Coca-Cola, he
naturally focused on two of its essential elements: the basic shade of
red and the advertising made with major stars in the 1930s and
1940s. While they helped create the cult image, the stars of
yesteryear have long since been ousted by the beautiful people of
today, with whom people can more easily identify. Katz takes up the
idea of leisure culture, ranging from sports to beach life, and
transforms it into a beautiful blonde in a white leotard. Aesthetics
and elegant movement merge into one again. ââThatâs Coca-Cola red,
from the companyâs outdoor signs in the fifties,â Katz explained. âYou
know, the blond girl in the red convertible, laughing with unlimited
happiness. Itâs a romance image, and for me it has to do with
Rembrandtâs The Polish Rider. I could never understand that
painting, but my mother and Frank OâHara both flipped over it, so I
realized I was missing something. They saw it as a romantic figure,
riding from the Black Sea to the Baltic.ââ (10)
For Alex Katz, this notion of the romantic as well as that of the great
painterly role model from the seventeenth century lives on: first
visible in a beautiful profile face, the short, curly strands fall over the
forehead, followed by a sequence of movement motifs, totally
concentrated on the body in the white leotard. The motifs often
appear as zoomed-in snapshots that focus exclusively on the center
of the body in the hard crop, and pick up the white and red as a
quote from the Coca-Cola logo. Particularly important here is the
tension between the intense red, which dominates the pictureâs
background, and the restrained white, accompanied by the skin
tone, which seems to increase in every subsequent motif. Finally,
Katz facets his model in Coca Cola Girl 5 in a threefold refraction,
each in a slightly modified pose (fig. 3). Again and again, it seems,
the artist, like a photographer, explores the best possible scenery,
the most interesting gesture, and the best lighting design in search
of the most ideal solution. It becomes a sequence of exploration and
experiment, of scenic diction that involves beholders in this process
of feeling and thinking, and also imparts to them the many
subcutaneous quotes: in the mindâs eye, Coca‑Cola advertising past
with its feeling of joie de vivre and leisure, likewise the game with
image snippets popular with advertisers, as well as the deliberately
planar, simplified style of painting in the Pop Art tradition; and in the
process Alex Katz never tires of quoting even himself. A clever
oscillation between supposed naivety and radical abstraction.
âEverything in Katzâall places, all peopleâlooks stylized, simplified,
cut to please the eye, and yet none of it looks trivial. Instead, the
paintings, and the collages, from the 1950s to the 2000s, exist on an
edge: an edge between pop and depth; between a love for individual
characters and places and an attraction to simplified repeated
patterns; between a realist sense that there are people and things in
the world that can be known, and a modernist attention to layers
and brushstrokes, and the flatness of paint.â (11) You never tire of
letting your eyes wander over these rich hues, whose subtle radiance
only opens up when you stand in front of them. Better still, if you
have the privilege of partaking in the elaborate printing process that
silkscreens require as they take shape color by color, and it becomes
clear that a red is not just a red, but the sum of a complex
composition of a myriad of color particles. Only these bring about
the magic of color presence, which is as present as it is unreal.
Behind it the subject almost disappearsâthe beautiful blonde in
Coca-Cola red.
Dr. Beate Reifenscheid
Ludwig Museum
Cologne, Germany |
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FRANK FLUEGEL GALERIE
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