As the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alex Katz grew up in the New York borough of Queens. His mother, who had trained as an actress, encouraged his interest in art and culture from an early age.

From 1946 to 1949, Katz studied at the prestigious Cooper Union Art School in New York, whose curriculum was strongly influenced by the ideas of the European avant-garde. He then continued his education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he developed a deep interest in landscape painting and working en plein air.

Following a first solo exhibition in 1954 that attracted little attention, Katz steadily developed a distinctive artistic language. During the 1960s, he also designed stage sets and costumes for the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Over the course of his career, he received numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting, election to the National Academy of Design, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Katz is best known for his large-scale portraits and landscapes, characterized by crisp outlines, vibrant colors, and a reduced yet elegant visual vocabulary. His works uniquely combine representation and abstraction and have had a lasting influence on contemporary figurative painting. Katz lives and works in New York and Maine.