Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927, to a Jewish family[1] in Brooklyn, New York, the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Ukraine, Odesa.

Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which proved pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today.

"[4] Every year from early June to mid-September, Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine.

[16] To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a masonite board; the sitting might take an hour and a half.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Katz developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts".

He continued painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him.

One Flight Up (1968) consists of more than 30 portraits of some of the leading lights of New York's intelligentsia during the late 1960s, such as the poet John Ashbery, the art critic Irving Sandler, and the curator Henry Geldzahler, who championed Andy Warhol.

"[20] In the late 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing, including Kate Moss and Christy Turlington.

The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz's print oeuvre.

In 1980, the U.S. General Services Administration's Art in Architecture Program commissioned Katz to create an oil-on-canvas mural in the new United States Attorney's Building at Foley Square, New York City.

[23] In 2005, Katz participated in a public art project titled "Paint in the City", commissioned by United Technologies Corporation and organized by Creative Time.

In 2005, Phaidon Press published an illustrated survey, Alex Katz, by Carter Ratcliff, Robert Storr and Iwona Blazwick.

[36] Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, David Salle, and Richard Prince have written essays about his work or conducted interviews with him.

[42][43] In 2011, Katz donated Rush (1971), a series of 37 painted life-size cutout heads on aluminum, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the piece is installed, frieze-like, in its own space.

[45] He was inducted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, and recognized with honorary doctorates by Colby College, Maine (1984), and Colgate University, Hamilton, New York (2005).

[46] In 2005, Katz was the honored artist at the Chicago Humanities Festival's Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series.

[38] In October 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art opened a 10,000-square-foot (930 m2) wing dedicated to Katz that features more than 400 oil paintings, collages, and prints he donated.

[47] In addition, he has purchased numerous pieces for the museum by artists such as Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, Francesco Clemente, and Elizabeth Murray.

In 2004, he curated a show at Colby of younger painters Elizabeth Peyton, Peter Doig and Merlin James, who work in the same figurative territory staked out by Katz.