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Chuck Close
Since the late 1960s Chuck Close has been concentrating on portraiture and the human face in painting and photography and is one of the most celebrated artists working today. Close often takes his family and friends as models, making monumental and classical works that are both bold in their simplicity as well as intangible, since the images appear as if they have been viewed through a thick layer of glass or are rippling on the surface of water. In this way, the subjects of his paintings can seem like apparitions, dissolving and resolving when viewed from different distances.
Although Close has employed various painterly styles throughout his career, including an intense neo-realism in the 1970s and a shadowy pointillisme in the 1980s, he is perhaps best known for his more recent works which are made up from a shimmering, fragile grid set on the diagonal. Close’s paintings are all-over images where the background of the picture – the negative space – is as important as the face itself and one cannot exist without the other. Likewise, in Close’s daguerreotype photographs, the background defines the limit of the image plane as well as the outline of the subject, with the inky pitch-black setting off the light, reflective quality of the subject’s face. Close’s method of painting is always indexical, an incremental process whereby associative colours and shapes build up a pictorial syntax and a recognisable figurative whole. Warm colours are set against cold, circles against squares and the organising principles of the grid are constantly broken by minute areas of expressive abstraction.
Chuck Close was born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington and lives and works in New York City and Long Island. He has exhibited in many important group exhibitions, including Documenta V and VI (1972 and 1977), The Whitney Biennial (1969, 1972, 1977, 1979, 1991), the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 2003) and the Carnegie International (1995-6). Close has had several retrospective touring exhibitions, including a touring show at four venues (1980-1981) that included the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; an touring show that travelled in Germany and France which included Lenbachhaus, Munich (1994), a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998-1999) that travelled to four venues, closing at the Hayward gallery, London (1999). ‘Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration’ travelled to several venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2004), ‘Chuck Close: Self Portraits 1967-2005’ (2005) opened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and travelled to SF MOMA (2006), High Museum, Atlanta (2006) and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2006).
More on Chuck Close
| Artworks | |
 | I 4 Images |
 | II 2 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Family and Others 10 Oct—17 Nov 2007 | |
| Recent Paintings 31 Jan—15 Mar 2003 | |
| PHOTOGRAPHS 23 Jun—4 Sep 1999 | |
| Artist's Publications Available in the Bookshop |
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| Family & Others 2007 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.moma.org/exhibit... Museum of Modern Art, New York | |
| http://www.metmuseum.org/sp... Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | |
| http://mmoca.org/exhibition... Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin | |
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