Mel Katz
Sculptor Mel Katz creates works of bold and contrasting color, exuberant shapes and subtle humor. Continuing a career-long fascination with shape and contour, Katz plays with positive and negative shapes to form wall sculptures made of machine cut, anodized aluminum. Always evolving, Katz’s work is fresh, clean and modern, refined by years of technical expertise and aesthetic consideration.
Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Mel Katz graduated from the Cooper Union Art School in 1953. He moved to Portland in 1963 and became well known in the early 1970s as one of the founders of the nationally reputed, Portland Center for the Visual Arts. Katz taught art at Portland State University until retiring in 1998. He has been exhibiting his work since 1956, which includes a solo show at the Hallie Ford Museum, in Salem, OR in 2006, a retrospective at the Portland Art Museum in 1988 and the highly acclaimed traveling exhibition Still Working, in 1994. Selected collections include; the Portland Art Museum, OR; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; City of Seattle; Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland; Good Samaritan Hospital, Portland, OR; and Safeco Insurance, Seattle, WA. In 2013, he completed a commission for Jefferson Elementary, Everett, WA, through the Washington State Arts Commission. A career retrospective is scheduled at the Hallie Ford Museum in 2015.
In a jubilant new series of wall sculptures, Mel Katz marries biomorphic shapes, intensely saturated colors, and gleaming finishes. Now in his eighties, Katz has continued to evolve his labor-intensive technique, and is doing quite possibly the finest work of his career.