Chuck Close

 Available Works

Biography

Chuck Close was an American artist best known for his large scale photorealist portraits of the human face. He was born on July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington, and used art from a young age to cope with a learning disability. At 14, seeing an exhibition of Jackson Pollock’s paintings encouraged him to pursue painting. He earned a BA from the University of Washington in 1962 and BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University in 1963 and 1964, then received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Vienna. After returning to the United States, he taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he moved away from Abstract Expressionism and began creating large black and white portraits based on photographs. In 1967 he had his first solo exhibition and soon settled in New York City, where he became known for monumental portraits made using a grid system and careful attention to photographic detail. Over time he experimented with color, fingerprint techniques, and other processes, always focusing on portraiture. In 1988 a spinal blood clot left him almost completely paralyzed, but he continued working with a brush strapped to his arm and developed paintings made of colorful grid units that formed faces from a distance. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998. Close died on August 19, 2021, in Oceanside, New York, and his work continues to be shown in major museums.