Chuck Close

Chuck Close – Faces over faces, impossibly sharp

Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington as Charles Thomas Close on 5 July 1940. He visited many acclaimed American schools including the University of Washington, Yale Summer School of Music and Art and the School of Art and Architecture in New Haven. A scholarship finally led him abroad to the Vienna Academy where he studied painting. In 1967 he settled permanently in New York and in the same year made a name for himself with his first major work “Big Nude”, an oversize black and white nude which accentuated details such as bikini lines, usually disregarded as unaesthetic. The artist remained true to this principle of unsightly particularities in later years, even when he moved increasingly from full-body shots to faces. Faces were also the theme of an acclaimed black and white picture series with the portrait “Richard” as its famous highlight, a three-meter-high work of the sculptor Richard Serra, a friend of Chuck Close.

Always in a grid, larger than life

In later years also, friends and acquaintances were Chuck Close’s preferred models. For all his apparent attention to details, however, the artist rejected the label “photorealism” throughout his life. He saw himself as a “trace eraser” who depicted not the real thing, but rather an artistic impression of it. Despite this, no other artist paid so much attention to the supposed flaws and blemishes of the sitter. Redness of skin, wrinkles, pores, cracks - that which would normally be covered with make-up or retouched stood in the limelight for Close, with which he certainly lived up to his name. He loved mercilessly close shots, the ruthless enlargement, the “close-up”. For this, Close always used a careful grid in which he broke down his motif. As a template, the artist used highly detailed and sharp photographs of the models which he transferred onto his canvas. In 1972, Chuck Close participated in documenta 5 in Kassel in the “Realism” division and repeated this success at documenta 6 in 1977. Close was unusually productive; by the end of 1979 he had finished over 100 works.

Art is stronger than the body

The artist suffered a burst blood vessel in his spine in 1988 and the resulting right-sided paraplegia forced Chuck Close permanently into an electric wheelchair. However, Close would not consider a premature end to his artistic path and instead accustomed himself to paint with the help of splints and slings. Perhaps as a result of his health limitations, it took the artist longer to produce work than for his early portraits, which were often thrown out in a brilliant frenzy. Over a two-year period, Chuck Close created the Japanese woodblock print “Emma” together with the printer Yasu Shibata. His passion and resilience paid off: Chuck Close received awards such as the National Medal of Arts for his work and was included in the “President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities” by the then US President Barack Obama in 2010.