Chuck Close

Since the late 1960s, Chuck Close has created larger-than-life, photo-based portraits of friends, family members, and fellow artists, which he calls “heads.” Prior to that time he painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, but renounced it for a more predetermined way of working: he began tracing grids over photographs of faces and transferred and enlarged them onto canvas, by the quarter-inch unit, using an airbrush filled with black paint. This methodical technique aligns Close’s output as much with the systematic rigor of some Minimalist and Conceptual art as with the Photorealism with which it is often linked. Phil—derived from a photograph of the composer Philip Glass, on which Close based a number of subsequent works—was among the first of these monumental black-and-white portraits. At the time, Glass was working as an assistant to the artist Richard Serra, and Close professed an interest in making “portraits of people who are in the arts but not famous.” Close’s images are exacting and dispassionate; they expose every minute facial detail, however unflattering, and yet, unlike conventional portraiture, reveal little about the characters of their subjects.

In 1970 Close started to work in color, adopting the layering processes used in color printing. He covered his surfaces in matrices of small dots, arranged in grids—abstract marks that coalesced into figurative depictions of faces. He began using his hand directly again in 1978, impressing his inked fingerprints on a grid and varying their density in order to convey texture and modeling. Mark/Fingerprint pictures Mark Greenwold—an artist Close first depicted in the early 1970s—using his fingerprints and red, yellow, and blue ink. Since the late 1980s, Close’s work has expanded beyond painting and prints to include photographs and tapestry portraits.