Chuck Close

One of the most influential artists of our time, Chuck Close has remained a vital presence on the contemporary scene by focusing exclusively on portraiture and self-portraiture. Since the 1960s, he has made hundreds of paintings, drawings, photographs, collages, and prints that depict himself, his friends, family, and fellow artists. The artist always begins with a photograph of his subject, but he has made a point to continually change the ways in which he uses his photographic sources. This has resulted in an evolving pictorial language that has become richer and more expansive over time.

Education, Early Work, and Shift to Realism

Close (b. 1940) earned a BA from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1962 and an MFA from Yale University in 1964. After a short stint teaching art at the University of Massachusetts, he moved to New York City. There, he abandoned the abstract style he had been using and began painting large-scale realist portraits.

Big Self-Portrait and Airbrush Experimentation

In order to push himself even further in this new direction, Close stopped using all the brushes and tools he’d become comfortable with and began painting with an airbrush. Big Self-Portrait (1967–1968), one of the first works he made using this new process, was purchased by the Walker shortly after it was completed. The sale, which was the artist’s first to a museum collection, inaugurated a decades-long relationship between Close and the Walker that has included many more acquisitions as well as two solo exhibitions.

Development of the Grid Technique

During the 1970s and 1980s, Close continued to experiment with new techniques ranging from “dot” drawings to collages of pressed and dyed paper pulp to images made with his own fingerprints, all of which were constructed on an underlying grid of squares. In the mid-1980s, he began to emphasize the grid itself by using larger, looser marks that turned each square into a self-contained, miniature abstraction.

 “The Event” and Later Career

In 1988, after suffering a collapsed spinal artery that left him paralyzed from the neck down (an occurrence he deemed “The Event”), Close was forced to find a new way to continue working. After regaining some movement in his arms, he resumed painting with the help of a customized wrist brace that holds his brush. The artist also has continued to make prints and photographs using such techniques as daguerreotype and computer-generated Iris printing.