At 96, Alex Katz is showing new paintings of three highly different kinds in an exhibition that coincides with the Venice Biennale. “Claire, Grass and Water” at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini features 26 works made between 2021 and 2022, some of them in modes Katz hasn’t attempted before and some with a sense of scale bigger than he has worked with in his more than seven decades as a painter. wargaqq

Thirteen works inspired by midcentury American fashion designer Claire McCardell channel the colorful figurative style for which Katz is best-known, but nine paintings of rippling ocean surfaces and four of grass are landscapes of a sort that is far less familiar.

Before the opening of his show—which was curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and runs through September 29—ARTnews spoke with Katz about his latest developments.

What made you want to come here to Venice? Of all the places you’ve been…

I came to Venice for five minutes because I want to see the show. There are all kinds of problematics. The paintings are new to the audience, and I don’t know whether I’m ahead of the audience or not. I don’t know whether they’ll look good either. I have one room with paintings of water. That looks great, and I didn’t worry about that. The next room is grass. I wouldn’t mind it being dramatized with just one 10-by-20-foot painting. But [curator Luca Massimo Barbero] hung it with four paintings. There are three 10-by-20s and one 10-by-10. There is a terracotta floor I had a lot of anxiety about. The Claire McCardell paintings I knew would look good. I wouldn’t have come over if it was just those.

What concerned you about the terracotta floor?

The color. The color fought a little bit with a big yellow painting. They lit it low because of the floor. I wanted it to be more like sunlight, so I said, “Put a little more light on it.” I haven’t seen it yet. But, basically, I’m very pleased with the show. And the couple of people who have seen it seem to get it. So I think it’ll be successful for me. wargaqq

The biggest paintings are among the biggest you’ve ever made. What made you want to work at that scale?

The idea of the landscape paintings was to make paintings that wrap around you like you are in the landscape, rather than looking at a landscape from a distance through holes in the wall. I felt I had to have that much size to get the effect I wanted. And they really worked out.

Are there landscape painters that achieve the effect you had in mind?

Bonnard did one that’s in the Phillips Collection. It really opens up. The idea was that landscape was going away from Picasso and Matisse, into an area where they didn’t work. They both worked with solid forms in the middle of the canvas—it’s sculptural. Mine are not like sculpture. They relate a little bit to Monet.

Your water paintings were based on photographs you took in Coney Island.

Yeah, I went to Coney Island in the winter and took pictures for the water paintings. Water has weight, motion, and transparency. When you try to paint all of those, you’re in open area. Winslow Homer painted water, but it was all surface—it never got to those qualities. wargaqq