ART CITIES: N.York-Chuck Close

In the 1960s, Chuck Close pioneered Photorealism with his monumental, exquisitely detailed portraits, whose subjects he took from photographic sources. Playing with ideas of color, scale, and form, he later gained renown for gridded paintings that appear abstract from up close and highly realistic and pixelated from afar. Close has often depicted his family and friends, including fellow artists Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra. His work links him not only to other Photorealists such as Richard Estes and Audrey Flack, but also to the Conceptual art movement.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo Pace Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings” features a selection of paintings, photographs, and works on papert hat reflect Chuck Close’s significant contributions to the history of art. Since it began representing Close in 1977, Pace has exhibited each new body of his work, and this upcoming presentation will complete that cycle. Chuck Close had a childhood marked by a medical problem that made it difficult for him to engage in strenuous activities. One alternative he found was the production of backyard magic and puppet shows. He also spent many hours drawing, wholeheartedly supported by his parents, who sent him to art classes as well. When Close was eleven, his father suffered a fatal stroke; his mother continued to encourage him to pursue an artistic career. Close attended community college in Everett, Washington (1958-1960), where his career goals changed from commercial to fine arts. In 1960 he transferred to the University of Washington (B.A. 1962). His success there led to an invitation to the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut (1961), and graduate work at Yale’s School of Art and Architecture in New Haven (B.F.A. 1963, M.F.A. 1964). Fellow students included Jennifer Bartlett, Rackstraw Downes, Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Brice Marden. Close studied at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1964-1965. He accepted his first teaching position at the University of Massachusetts, where he began to shift from the organic forms, arbitrary color, and abstraction of his student years to the photographic vocabulary and large-scale compositions of his mature style. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York University, and Yale Summer School of Music and Art. Close first experimented with etching at Yale, where he served for a time as Gabor Peterdi’s assistant. At the urging of Bob Feldman of Parasol Press, he created his first professional print in 1972, working with Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press, San Francisco, he produced “Keith” the first work in which he revealed the grid system he had been using to translate his photographic images. Since the 1970s, Close has been known for his innovative approach to conceptual portraiture, systematically transposing his subjects’ likenesses from photographs into gridded paintings. Over the course of five decades, his work challenged conventional modes of representation across a wide range of media, including various forms of painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, daguerreotypes, Polaroid photography, and tapestry. The artist posed a radical proposition with his approach to painting, going against the grain of art world trends during the late 1960s and 1970s, when Minimalism, abstraction, and seriality were dominant, and portraiture and photorealism were largely overlooked. The exhibition spotlight Close’s final body of paintings, which includes works that have never been publicly exhibited. These full-color portraits and self-portraits employ a palette of only three colors: red, yellow and blue. Layering transparent glazes of paint, Close created an effect of abstract likeness entirely different from that of his previous work. The complex color relationships that unfold in these paintings are visible at the bleeding edges of each square within the grid, where the ragged ends of each individual color are visible. Meditating on the power of color itself, Close’s final works suggest the constructive aesthetics of Impressionism, where form is built up through a chromatic architecture of brushstrokes. Appearing more abstract than representational to the human eye, the likenesses in these portraits come into greater focus when viewed from a distance or through the lens of a camera, an act of transfiguration that speaks to the artist’s interest in modes of perception and information processing. As the artist said “A face is a road map of someone’s life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there’s a great deal that’s communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been”. Close realized these formal achievements in his last works while grappling with long-term health issues precipitated by a spinal aneurysm that he suffered in 1988 at the age of 48. Having lost the use of his arms and legs as a result of the aneurysm, Close was told by doctors that he would never be able to paint again. Through a grueling process of rehabilitation, he eventually regained his ability to paint by using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrists and forearms. Working through this disability for the rest of his life, he was forced to teach himself how to paint in an entirely new way, reinventing his approach to the medium in the middle of his career. In his final works, Close continued to push against the constraints of his physical disability to reinvent his own painterly language once again. Even prior to his aneurysm, however, Close struggled with other disabilities. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he used art as a means of navigating severe dyslexia and prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Having studied at the University of Washington, Yale, and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, he began teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—where he would present his first solo exhibition—in the mid-1960s. Upon relocating to New York, the artist continued to explore new modes of realism, using an airbrush to paint black- and-white, highly detailed photographic portraits of himself, his family, and his friends onto large-scale canvases, a practice he would continue for the rest of his career. Close began in the late 1970s to make use of a grid system based on a physical relationship to his support. The resulting works read like pixelated mosaics wherein the viewer deciphers a unified image within juxtaposed colors, shapes, lines, and fingerprints. The artist’s first retrospective, titled “Close Portraits”, was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1980. That show traveled to the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago before closing at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the early 1990s, he began experimenting with portraiture through the production of silk tapestries and, in 2003, he furthered this investigation, creating editions of large-scale Jacquard tapestry portraits. In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a full-scale retrospective of Close’s career that included more than 90 paintings, drawings, and photographs, cementing his status as one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Photo: Chuck Close, Fred, 2017-2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 30,9 in (Diptych), © Chuck Close, Courtesy Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 23/2-13/4/2024,Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/