Alex Katz review ★★★★★

At two years shy of his 90th birthday, NYC painter Alex Katz is the most productive he's ever been. He's had, what he calls, a "hot streak", producing large-scale painting after large-scale painting. The results of said streak can be found over at Hyde Park, where a series of Katz' landscapes hang at the Serpentine.

One of America's most feted living painters, Katz' bright, brash paintings are instantly recognisable. He came of age back when Pollock was dripping and de Kooning was smearing, but his work has nothing whatsoever to do with Abstract Expressionism. "If you put my work next to an aggressive A.E. painting, I'll eat most of ‘em up," the artist asserts, modestly

Katz is a figurative painter, who paints big, flat canvases, tiled with unwavering blocks of colour. His paintings are highly stylized, borrowing freely from visual advertising culture of advertising. The subjects are well-heeled, white and undeniably chic. This was pre-Pop Art, remember: no-one else was painting large figures against a monochrome background."Warhol ripped me off", as Katz recently quipped.

© Alex Katz; Reflection 7, 2008; Courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rome/New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg; © Alex Katz, DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2016; Photograph: Paul Takeuchi

This latest exhibition brings together a series of recent landscapes. As ever, we're presented with flat paintings, invisible brushstrokes and chunky blocks of colour. The effect is strangely draining. The painting are an attempt to capture the effects of light, "the present tense" as the artist says. They end up strangely dull: nothing like Hockney's visionary rendering of Yorkshire landscapes, unified and brimming with élan. Devoid of emotion and the idea of a fleeting moment, there is no life beneath the elegant surfaces of these paintings.

Walk across the Serpentine bridge to the Sackler Gallery's Etel Adnan exhibition: there you'll find abstract landscapes which sing with emotion.