SHANGHAI.- James Cohan Gallery Shanghai presents Alex Katz, the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in mainland China. The exhibition focuses on five recent portrait paintings from 2008 to 2010, along with a selection of prints that feature the artist’s lifelong interest in the landscape. Alex Katz (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1927) has been a defining, preeminent and influential artist for the past fifty years. Graduating in 1949 from The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan he was then awarded a scholarship to the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he studied plein air painting, and which the artist soon realized, as Katz commented, “helped me separate myself from European painting and find my own eyes.” Katz had his first one-person exhibition in New York City in 1954. Since the early 1960s, emerging in New York