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Lot Essay
‘I think style is the content of my painting, and style belongs to fashion’ (Alex Katz)
In Alex Katz’s Sissel (2000), an elegant figure clothed in a sky-blue suit stands out against a pale, champagne-coloured background. The subject is Sissel Kardel, an artist Katz encountered in New York City around the turn of the millennium. Katz is celebrated for his portraits of friends and contemporaries, typically depicted within closely cropped compositions or—as in the present work—isolated against an enveloping painted ground. His figures become ‘types,’ paragons of the studied ease and effortless beauty which suffuses the urbane social world Katz has faithfully chronicled for some seven decades. Painted in 2000 and acquired by Alessandro Grassi the following year, Sissel was included in an exhibition of works from the Grassi collection titled Codice Colore, at the Centro Pecci, Prato in 2018, as well as an exhibition of contemporary portraiture at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto across 2013-2014.
Katz has long been interested in questions of style and fashion. Both of his parents were attentive to aesthetics, and as a child he recalls sitting with his father in the porch of their home in the St. Albans neighbourhood of Queens, New York, passing judgements on the style of passersby. His understanding of colour was similarly developed at this early age, kindled by the striking combinations—pink and maroon, pale yellow and pale violet—selected by his mother for the walls of their home. As an art student at Cooper Union in the late 1940s, Katz filled sketchbooks with wiry ink drawings of commuters on the New York City subway, in which he was invariably attentive to details of dress and demeanour. Throughout his oeuvre, clothing and hair recur as important markers of temporal specificity, forming a chronology of style across the later decades of the twentieth century and into the new millennium.
Painting wet-on-wet, Katz’s matte, slick brushwork reflects the surface of the society in which he lives, and the ways in which his subjects present themselves to the world. Often there is a stillness to their form which recalls nineteenth-century portraiture, for which subjects were required to hold their pose throughout long exposures. In Sissel, an unseen light source beams down from beyond the painting’s frame, starkly illuminating her icy blonde hair and pale blue clothing. Captured in a relaxed contrapposto stance and holding a thin-stemmed wine glass in her right hand, Kardel appears as though lifted from a city soirée or an art gallery’s private view, plucked from the crowd by a raking spotlight. ‘They come as they are,’ explains Katz of his models, ‘and you want them that way. I never alter the clothes’ (A. Katz quoted in S. Sporn, ‘Alex Katz Would Rather Own a 1930s Balenciaga Coat Than a Richard Serra’, Vogue, 17 April 2024).
Katz’s distinctive monochromatic backgrounds—which would ultimately evolve into the artist’s iconic cutout paintings—serve to foreground these details of individuality, and at the same time impart a sense of endlessness reminiscent of the all-over canvases and colour fields of American Abstract Expressionism. They are informed also by the eighteenth-century Japanese painter and printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro, whose work, first encountered by Katz in the 1950s, similarly hovers between stylisation and representation. In Sissel, the sweeping champagne background creates a sense of openness, pushing Kardel out into the viewer’s space while simultaneously pulling them into hers. Caught in a painterly snapshot, she emerges radiant and serene, at once timeless and undeniably of our time.
Il Senso del Colore: Works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection
‘Colour has always had a great presence in my life, so much so that in the choice of the works colour itself, before anything else … is the dominant element’ (Alessandro Grassi)
Christie’s is honoured to present a selection of works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection, to be offered in sales across Paris and London in October 2025. This occasion marks a rare opportunity to acquire works from one of the most storied collections in Italy.
Alessandro Grassi (1942-2009) was born among colours. His chemist father was a founder of Colorama, a key producer of printing inks, and he would follow into this field, becoming a prominent industrialist in Milan. An elegant and sophisticated man, he began his collection in 1979 with the Transavanguardia: a group of Italian artists who embraced vivid colour, form and symbolism in reaction to the Conceptual and Minimal tendencies of the previous decade. ‘I’m anti-minimalist’, Grassi said. ‘Everything I bought was because it provoked a strong emotion in me at the time.’
Grassi soon became a leading Transavanguardia collector, and expanded into genres from Pop to Spatialism and Arte Povera. He forged close relationships with the eminent art historian Achille Bonito Oliva and the Modena-based gallerist Emilio Mazzoli, from whom he acquired many works, often from the artists’ inaugural exhibitions. He lived among them in an extraordinary art-filled apartment in Milan, documented in the 1993 volume Collezione privata. He lent generously to museum exhibitions, and left a significant bequest to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) upon his death. More recently, the collection was celebrated in the 2018 exhibition Codice colore at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, the city of Grassi’s birth.
Italian art formed the core of the collection. Among the works offered are two paintings by Salvo, who plays with genre and fame in his Paessagio (1984) and 31 Siciliani (1976). Mario Schifano’s magnificent Grande quadro equestre italiano (1978) is another highlight. Widely reproduced—appearing on the cover of Flash Art, and in Schifano’s major retrospective of 2002—it is an exemplary work by the maverick postmodern painter, who drew upon urban experience and deconstructed art-historical tradition.
Elsewhere, Untitled (1989-1991), a rare collaborative tapestry by Mimmo Paladino and Alighiero Boetti, offers a meditation on the infinite, intertwined complexities of existence. Gino de Dominicis’s Untitled (1997-1998), with its red figure set amid a gleaming ground of silver, is a typically enigmatic vision from one of post-war Italy’s most mysterious artists. Grassi did not limit himself to any one medium or category, and developed an international outlook over the years. He was drawn to the bold visual language of Alex Katz, whose Kym 2 (1989-1990), Study for Chance (1990) and Sissel (2000) are among the standout works in this selection. They relate both to American Pop and to the Neo- Expressionist tendency that paralleled Italy’s Transavanguardia. Valley Curtain (project for Colorado) (1972), meanwhile, is a drawing for Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s installation which spanned a Colorado highway with bright orange fabric.
With an exacting eye for colour, mood and expressive power, Grassi assembled a remarkable collection that ranked among the finest in Italy. Together, the works offered paint a picture of the passion and personal feeling with which Grassi pursued his vision, and of the joy and vibrancy that art can bring to life.
In Alex Katz’s Sissel (2000), an elegant figure clothed in a sky-blue suit stands out against a pale, champagne-coloured background. The subject is Sissel Kardel, an artist Katz encountered in New York City around the turn of the millennium. Katz is celebrated for his portraits of friends and contemporaries, typically depicted within closely cropped compositions or—as in the present work—isolated against an enveloping painted ground. His figures become ‘types,’ paragons of the studied ease and effortless beauty which suffuses the urbane social world Katz has faithfully chronicled for some seven decades. Painted in 2000 and acquired by Alessandro Grassi the following year, Sissel was included in an exhibition of works from the Grassi collection titled Codice Colore, at the Centro Pecci, Prato in 2018, as well as an exhibition of contemporary portraiture at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto across 2013-2014.
Katz has long been interested in questions of style and fashion. Both of his parents were attentive to aesthetics, and as a child he recalls sitting with his father in the porch of their home in the St. Albans neighbourhood of Queens, New York, passing judgements on the style of passersby. His understanding of colour was similarly developed at this early age, kindled by the striking combinations—pink and maroon, pale yellow and pale violet—selected by his mother for the walls of their home. As an art student at Cooper Union in the late 1940s, Katz filled sketchbooks with wiry ink drawings of commuters on the New York City subway, in which he was invariably attentive to details of dress and demeanour. Throughout his oeuvre, clothing and hair recur as important markers of temporal specificity, forming a chronology of style across the later decades of the twentieth century and into the new millennium.
Painting wet-on-wet, Katz’s matte, slick brushwork reflects the surface of the society in which he lives, and the ways in which his subjects present themselves to the world. Often there is a stillness to their form which recalls nineteenth-century portraiture, for which subjects were required to hold their pose throughout long exposures. In Sissel, an unseen light source beams down from beyond the painting’s frame, starkly illuminating her icy blonde hair and pale blue clothing. Captured in a relaxed contrapposto stance and holding a thin-stemmed wine glass in her right hand, Kardel appears as though lifted from a city soirée or an art gallery’s private view, plucked from the crowd by a raking spotlight. ‘They come as they are,’ explains Katz of his models, ‘and you want them that way. I never alter the clothes’ (A. Katz quoted in S. Sporn, ‘Alex Katz Would Rather Own a 1930s Balenciaga Coat Than a Richard Serra’, Vogue, 17 April 2024).
Katz’s distinctive monochromatic backgrounds—which would ultimately evolve into the artist’s iconic cutout paintings—serve to foreground these details of individuality, and at the same time impart a sense of endlessness reminiscent of the all-over canvases and colour fields of American Abstract Expressionism. They are informed also by the eighteenth-century Japanese painter and printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro, whose work, first encountered by Katz in the 1950s, similarly hovers between stylisation and representation. In Sissel, the sweeping champagne background creates a sense of openness, pushing Kardel out into the viewer’s space while simultaneously pulling them into hers. Caught in a painterly snapshot, she emerges radiant and serene, at once timeless and undeniably of our time.
Il Senso del Colore: Works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection
‘Colour has always had a great presence in my life, so much so that in the choice of the works colour itself, before anything else … is the dominant element’ (Alessandro Grassi)
Christie’s is honoured to present a selection of works from the Alessandro Grassi Collection, to be offered in sales across Paris and London in October 2025. This occasion marks a rare opportunity to acquire works from one of the most storied collections in Italy.
Alessandro Grassi (1942-2009) was born among colours. His chemist father was a founder of Colorama, a key producer of printing inks, and he would follow into this field, becoming a prominent industrialist in Milan. An elegant and sophisticated man, he began his collection in 1979 with the Transavanguardia: a group of Italian artists who embraced vivid colour, form and symbolism in reaction to the Conceptual and Minimal tendencies of the previous decade. ‘I’m anti-minimalist’, Grassi said. ‘Everything I bought was because it provoked a strong emotion in me at the time.’
Grassi soon became a leading Transavanguardia collector, and expanded into genres from Pop to Spatialism and Arte Povera. He forged close relationships with the eminent art historian Achille Bonito Oliva and the Modena-based gallerist Emilio Mazzoli, from whom he acquired many works, often from the artists’ inaugural exhibitions. He lived among them in an extraordinary art-filled apartment in Milan, documented in the 1993 volume Collezione privata. He lent generously to museum exhibitions, and left a significant bequest to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) upon his death. More recently, the collection was celebrated in the 2018 exhibition Codice colore at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, the city of Grassi’s birth.
Italian art formed the core of the collection. Among the works offered are two paintings by Salvo, who plays with genre and fame in his Paessagio (1984) and 31 Siciliani (1976). Mario Schifano’s magnificent Grande quadro equestre italiano (1978) is another highlight. Widely reproduced—appearing on the cover of Flash Art, and in Schifano’s major retrospective of 2002—it is an exemplary work by the maverick postmodern painter, who drew upon urban experience and deconstructed art-historical tradition.
Elsewhere, Untitled (1989-1991), a rare collaborative tapestry by Mimmo Paladino and Alighiero Boetti, offers a meditation on the infinite, intertwined complexities of existence. Gino de Dominicis’s Untitled (1997-1998), with its red figure set amid a gleaming ground of silver, is a typically enigmatic vision from one of post-war Italy’s most mysterious artists. Grassi did not limit himself to any one medium or category, and developed an international outlook over the years. He was drawn to the bold visual language of Alex Katz, whose Kym 2 (1989-1990), Study for Chance (1990) and Sissel (2000) are among the standout works in this selection. They relate both to American Pop and to the Neo- Expressionist tendency that paralleled Italy’s Transavanguardia. Valley Curtain (project for Colorado) (1972), meanwhile, is a drawing for Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s installation which spanned a Colorado highway with bright orange fabric.
With an exacting eye for colour, mood and expressive power, Grassi assembled a remarkable collection that ranked among the finest in Italy. Together, the works offered paint a picture of the passion and personal feeling with which Grassi pursued his vision, and of the joy and vibrancy that art can bring to life.