Chuck Close
About the Exhibition
The exhibition Chuck Close offers a 30-year overview of the painter's body of work. Best known for his colossal portraits of human faces, Close refers to these paintings, drawings, and prints as "heads," perhaps declaring that his work is more about working processes than the identity of his models.
From the earliest paintings to the most recent, this exhibition allows us to examine Close's often experimental and sometimes contradictory methods of working: painting with an airbrush; painting with his own fingers; meticulously transferring photographic images onto grids many times their size; or totally obliterating the rigid uniformity of the grid by "painting" with irregular fragments of paper.
As a student at Yale in the early 1960s, Close was heavily influenced by abstract expressionism, the dominant art movement of the 1950s.
Abstract expressionists placed absolute importance on the "gesture" in painting; thus it is the wide sweeping brush stroke of Willem de Kooning and the vertiginous web of Jackson Pollock's drips that convey meaning in their work. Close once said, "I have made Hans Hofmanns easily as good as Hans Hofmann made and sometimes better."
Later in the 1960s Close began working to counter art world biases that still existed in favor of abstract expressionism. He wished to reduce the brush stroke to its most infinitesimal degree, to minimize or even cancel its importance entirely. For this reason, his work has been associated with other art movements as mutually exclusive as austere minimalism and photorealism.
Ironically, to achieve results in his work that were innovative and entirely contrary to the aesthetic of abstract expressionism, Close used a method as old as the Italian Renaissance-the grid. Photographing his models (colleagues, friends, or family members) from the neck up, Close then applied a grid over the photo, dividing its surface into a uniform system of small squares. The grid remains visible in many of the smaller works on paper as evidence of the artist’s continued investigation of his processes.
After his Polaroid collage self-portrait of 1979, the grid structure Close used in his painting remained exposed, and the mark of the brush, or rather the substance of paint, was no longer concealed. He exchanged realistic pigmentation, such as that seen in Susan (1971), for a mapping in Stanley (1980) in which the disposition of color on the canvas takes precedence over what skin actually looks like.
Gradually Close's use of color departed from the carefully developed palette he used to imitate the color of Polaroid photography. Now unmodulated fragments of color are laid side by side to create optical effects not unlike that used in digital imaging. By the mid 1980s Close's paintings were about the very art of painting; however he remains far removed from what could remotely be considered "gestural." He does, however, find a parallel with the dynamic effect that gestural painting achieves. In an ingenious parody of his early abstract expressionist influences, he tips his grid so that it sometimes runs diagonally. Since the orientation of the head remains vertical, the resulting effect is a dizzying blur.
Surprisingly, Chuck Close is a more emotional exhibition than the cool detachment of his subjects might let on. Beyond the skill of the painter and the expression of the models, it is Close’s absolute passion for painting combined with his masterful restraint that astonishes us.
This major touring exhibition surveys the full spectrum of this American artist’s remarkable career. Over three decades, Close has assembled a body of work of exceptional intelligence and inventiveness. Presenting some 90 works in a variety of media - paintings, drawings, prints, photographs - the exhibition explores the many stylistic phases of the artist’s work, from his early gray - scale portraits of family and friends to his more recent colorful patchwork paintings and psychologically charged portraits of fellow artists. The exhibition, which was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with in-depth essays and an interview with the artist.
The Chicago presentation of Chuck Close was coordinated by Lucinda Barnes, former MCA Curator of Collections.
Curator’s Overview
Throughout his 30-year career, Chuck Close has painted, drawn, printed, and photographed one thing-the human head. His often-colossal portraits constitute a remarkable body of work dedicated to the problem of constructing an image of the same subject in myriad ways.
A graduate student at Yale in the 1960s, Close was steeped in the overriding taste for abstract expressionism-an abstract painting style that came to prominence in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, characterized by large-scale canvases; bold, gestural brushstrokes; and a lack of reference to the figure. Though Close was able to produce skillful paintings in that manner, he established his artistic independence by turning to something almost diametrically opposed-carefully observed figurative painting.
He introduced himself to the New York art scene in the late 1960s with monumental airbrushed paintings, such as Big Self-Portrait (1967-68), based on photographic "mug shots" of himself and his friends, many of them artists themselves. Startling in their size and their unsparing attention to detail, Close's early portraits do not contain any trace of the artist's hand; they were meticulously constructed from thousands of marks made using an airbrush.
These groundbreaking works feature the compositional setup to which Close would adhere throughout most of his career-a frontal, symmetrical, head-and-shoulders figure, closely cropped on the top and sides. Close’s source image is always a photograph-he uses the camera to generate an image that contains all of the information he needs to paint his subject. After applying a grid to his rather deadpan photographs, Close transfers the information from each square in the photo’s grid to its corresponding square on a gridded canvas. The distortion inherent in the transposed image, specifically the out-of-focus areas (usually the nose, the shoulders, and the ears), reveal that the painted head is in fact derived from a photographic likeness. This, along with the often-visible underlying grid structure and the enormity and intensity of the faces themselves, heightens the artificiality of Close’s portraits, emphasizing that the works are above all paint distributed on a flat surface.
Though early on Close exhibited with other "realist" painters, his basic concerns were more truly allied with those of the minimal and conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Countering the intuitive and highly personal aesthetics of abstract expressionism, many of these artists set self-imposed parameters from which to work. Artists like Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and (a bit earlier) Ad Reinhardt made works and wrote texts that outlined their interest in control, repetition, and process in order to investigate formal and material concerns.
Similarly, Close explores picture-making through a predetermined system of rules that does not allow for much improvisation. Though singularly focused, his body of work illustrates countless variations of forms and materials with which he has constructed and deconstructed a simple "identity-card" photograph. Close has often said that he doesn't wait for inspiration to strike. When he paints his heads, he selects a particular method with which he will create the image. Though this may seem a rather detached and impersonal way to produce art, Close's finished portraits are cool in their expression yet dynamic in their forms and in their presence. They are captivating but disconcerting, extraordinary but familiar.
The media Close has used to build his imposing "heads" range from acrylic paint, watercolor, pastel, and oil paint to ink, paper pulp, photography, and numerous printing methods. The orientation of the structural grid, be it vertical, radiating, or diagonal, and the incremental size of each grid square are variables that change throughout Close's development and affect the sense of each final portrait. One of the most striking qualities of his work is the ingenious variation he employs in his mark making. Endlessly inventive, Close has conceived marks of many different forms and continues to do so despite the paralysis that struck in 1988. The mechanical airbrushed dots of his early work, as in Robert, 104,072 (1973-74), gave way to the fingerprints of Fanny/Fingerpainting (1985) literally bringing the artist's hand back into his paintings.
Along with the looser structure of his works of the late 1980s and 1990s come more painterly marks and bursts of bright color, revealing his long-suppressed interest in gestural painting (abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning has been cited as Close’s favorite artist). Energetic squares filled with diagonal strokes and circular or elliptical shapes of bright colors, each a small abstract painting in its own right, comprise Close’s new system. The exaggerated, lively quality of these increments only heightens the tension between the often disorienting experience of viewing the works from a distance and then scanning their parts up close.
Dichotomies of this sort are inherent in Close’s works-the calculated technique and rigid grid structure used to depict something as irregular as the human physiognomy; the enlarged yet exquisitely detailed faces; the tension between the two-dimensional painted surface and the three-dimensional image. All contribute to the complexity and the richness of Close’s paintings.
It is difficult to ignore a Chuck Close painting, not just because of the size and precise detail, but because it is a representation of something we all possess-a human face. Though they may not resemble our looks or even accurately resemble the everyday appearance of the sitter, the portraits permit us to scrutinize gigantic mirrors of ourselves, inviting us to consider the perhaps unpleasant thought of what we might look like enlarged to such a scale.
Powerful in their monumentality yet vulnerable in their frank exposure, these heads are above all human and together evoke a diverse range of states of mind. The psychological dimension of Close’s works, however, come less from the individual attributes of the subject and more from the artist’s ever-changing formal dynamic, one that has ranged from the cool, detached airbrushed system of his earliest works to the vibrant, celebratory brushstrokes of his latest portraits of fellow New York artists. These recent works communicate Close’s masterful capacity to create new pictorial possibilities within his consistently regulated system. His visually challenging paintings, which simultaneously build a potent image and pull it apart, continue to dazzle both the eye and the mind.
—Staci Boris, Associate Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Funding
The Chicago presentation and related education programs are generously sponsored by The Richard H. Cooper Foundation, LaSalle Banks, and John Nuveen Company, with additional support from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. Air transportation services are provided by American Airlines, the official airline of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Individual support is generously provided by Marjorie K. and William L. Staples.
This exhibition was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition and its accompanying publication were made possible by generous grants from Michael and Judy Ovitz, Banana Republic, and Jon and Mary Shirley.