Back in the 1950s and 60s, when the American artist Alex Katz was a young man, Abstract Expressionism was dominant. Katz quietly rejected it, creating flat planes of color that puzzled perception. In the late 50s, he began drawing small seaside landscapes, an interest that would return in the 1990s. Over the last three decades, during long hot summers in Maine, Katz has studied light and its reflections on water continuously. In this solo show, ahead of his upcoming monographic display at New York’s Guggenheim, 50 works executed between 1989 and 2020 offer up orange sunsets, shadowed lakes, and oceans an impossible blue. —E.C.