Alex Katz is often considered the leading modern portraitist of the second half of the 20th century. In Hiroshi, 1979 Katz combines his lifelong approach to depicting friends and family with his enigmatic technique and style.

As his subjects were overwhelmingly friends and colleagues, the artist's primary muse was his wife, Ada. The present work however is a portrait of Hiroshi Kawanishi, a silkscreen printer and artist whom Katz knew well. Featured more than once in the artist's work, Hiroshi also appears accompanied by his wife Marcia in the Tate Modern's Hiroshi and Marcia, 1981.

Stylistically, it was in the 1950s that Katz began his singular mode of portraiture – aiming for increased scale, depth and ultimately a greater sense of realism than previously. Shifting toward a monochrome palette for backgrounds, with a technique approaching color blocking (not unlike post-painterly abstract artists painting in the decade before the present work), the artist's path diverged from his predecessors who experimented with gestural figuration and action painting as his work became succinctly realist.

In the 2010s, the artist revisited his style of portraiture with even more intentional cropping to the degree that mimics the sensation of viewing film in slow motion. The viewer is able to observe action in an unseen way, moment by moment, following the age-old art historical pursuit of capturing subjects in motion.