Close, Chuck

Chuck Close: Work

The first comprehensive critical examination of one of America's most celebrated living artists.

Chuck Close reinvented portraiture almost four decades ago with a series of nine-foot-tall, black-and-white likenesses of himself and fellow artists, which astonished an art world dominated by minimalism and conceptualism. Close has since explored the possibilities implicit in his original breakthrough in an array of mediums. This lavish, large-format volume is the first to deal with all aspects of Close's career and to place them in a biographical context.

Christopher Finch's insight into Close's achievement comes by way of hundreds of studio visits and thousands of hours of conversation since he met Close in 1968. Finch provides an engaging, in-depth analysis of Close's portraits on canvas, from the continuous-tone airbrushed heads of the 1960s and `70s to the painterly "prismatic grids" of the past two decades. The more than 300 illustrations featured in the book include almost all of Close's paintings, a selection of his prints and multiples, and examples of his photographic oeuvre. Many unpublished photos from the artist's personal archive enrich the reader's understanding of his inspiring life and the fascinating processes he has invented to create his art. This beautifully designed volume reveals not only the variety of pictorial strategies Close has devised, but the extraordinary personality of the artist behind the work.

Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait

One of the most admired and innovative contemporary artists working today, Chuck Close has pioneered ideas of scale, form, and color through the theme of portraiture, a genre that he has fundamentally redefined. The first book to focus on Close's self-portraits and the portraits he has made of fellow artists, Close Reading is a uniquely intimate portrait of Close's life and work by the former director of the Walker Art Center, Martin Friedman, a longtime friend who has had unprecedented access to the artist.

After covering the biographical details of Close's life-including the sudden illness in 1988 that led to near-complete paralysis, and the degree of recovery that enabled him to continue his painting career-Friedman moves on to a probing examination of Close's self-portraiture. The final section deals with Close's paintings of artist subjects, among them Cindy Sherman, Francesco Clemente, Jasper Johns, and William Wegman. Included here are Close's insightful comments about these works and Friedman's discussions with the artists themselves, which reveal much about Close's accomplishments and issues of self-portraiture in both Close's art and their own.

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration

Chuck Close--a man who describes himself as "an artist looking for trouble"--has for three decades consistently but variously challenged the accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. Published to accompany a retrospective of his prints opening at Blaffer Gallery and traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and several additional museums around the country, this is the first comprehensive survey of Close's revolutionary prints.

Featuring exquisite reproductions of the prints together with essays on Close's career and in-depth interviews with the artist and his master printmakers, the volume blends words and images to give readers unique insight into the creative process. The text highlights the intensely collaborative nature of Close's project and looks into the challenges posed by the unprecedented huge scale he prefers. Close may labor on a single print for as long as two years, working out aesthetic problems that might involve the retrieval of a centuries-old European method on one day and the creation of an entirely new technique (such as applying sunscreen to block light) the next. "Prints have moved me in my unique work more than anything else has," Close says. "Prints change the way I think about things."

From the artist's ambitious first mezzotint to his recent pulp-paper multiples, this book chronicles the genius of Chuck Close in the medium in which he has done his most exciting work. Taken together, these prints constitute a remarkable self-portrait of the creative drive, vision, and intellect of one of America's most important living artists.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston
September 13-November 23, 2003

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 13-April 18, 2004

Miami Art Museum, Florida
May 14-August 22, 2004

Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee
October 29, 2004-March 27, 2005

Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina
April 16-August 7, 2005

Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
September 6-December 4, 2005

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
April 16-June 28, 2006

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin
July 29 - October 6, 2006

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
January 28-April 20, 2007

Boise Art Museum, Idaho
May 12-August 11, 2007

Portland Art Museum, Oregon
September-December 2007

Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005

"A celebrated, popular, and influential figure in American art, Chuck Close has focused exclusively, and with great innovation, on the genre of portraiture. This exhibition, co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, explores the artist's work in self-portraiture over four decades and across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, photography, collage, and printmaking. The first comprehensive museum survey of Close's self-portraits, the exhibition and its accompanying publication offer a fascinating glimpse of an artist's self-examination and evolution over time and elucidate his unbounded, process-driven experimentation with media and techniques. Working with the seemingly narrow subject of his own face, Close has produced a richly varied trove that ranges from intimately scaled collage maquettes and fingerprint drawings to monumental gridded canvases; from the sharp definition of certain photographic techniques to the ghostly blurs of daguerreotypes and holograms; from the tactile complexity of paper pulp editions to the smooth, mechanical surfaces of Polaroids and digital ink-jet prints; from the subtle tonalities of gray-scale paintings and drawings to the exuberance of an 111-color screenprint. When Close unleashes his imagination on his own visage, this familiar figure is at his most revealing."

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something

A Couple of Ways of Doing Something replicates a deluxe limited-edition portfolio whose initial run was only 75 copies. This clothbound edition preserves the luxurious sensibility of the original with 22 extraordinary oversized daguerreotypes printed in rich tritone. Working with daguerreotype master Jerry Spagnoli to conquer the complexities of this venerable process, which yields images of astonishing detail and gravity, Chuck Close photographed many of the same artist-friends who have made regular appearances in his paintings over the years: Laurie Anderson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Cecily Brown, Gregory Crewdson, Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Philip Glass, Bob Holman, Elizabeth Murray, Elizabeth Peyton, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, James Siena, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, James Turrell, Robert Wilson, Terry Winters, Lisa Yuskavage and himself. Each image is complemented by a poem on its subject by Bob Holman, the celebrated and widely published New York School poet who originated and hosted the famous Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and now runs the Bowery Poetry Club. With the counterpoint of Holman's engaging poetry, the collected work becomes a transfixing group portrait of Close's influential and highly creative circle of friends and colleagues, as well as an exploration of a challenging photographic medium. A traveling exhibition of the work will launch in November 2006 at the Aperture Gallery.

Chuck Close

This volume, the most comprehensive assessment of Chuck Close's work yet published, accompanied a mid-career retrospective exhibition that opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, on February 25, 1998. A leading figure in the New York art world since the early 1970s, Close has recently concentrated on portraits of his artist friends and colleagues, characterized by colorful patterning and vivid brushwork. Subjects include Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, Lucas Samaras, and Lorna Simpson. Here, more than 90 paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs are reproduced, along with details and comparative illustrations.

Parkett # 60: Chuck Close, Diana Thater, Luc Tuymans

Presenting unique and in-depth collaborations and editions with leading international artists, Parkett No. 60 features Chuck Close, Diana Thater, and Luc Tuymans, three artists from very different backgrounds whose works have all moved towards painting's basic elements of light and dark. Contributing writers include Francine Prose and Richard Shiff on Close; Sara Arrhenius, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Regina Hasslinger on Thater; and Laura Hoptman, Gerardo Mosquera and Hans Rudolf Reust on Tuymans. This issue also contains essays on David Bunn, Jeremy Deller, and Paul Etienne Lincoln, as well as a conversation between Chuck Close and Elizabeth Peyton and an interview with Close by Bice Curiger.

Chuck Close: Self-Portraits Boxed Postcards (cards)

Twenty-five different 4 1/4 x 6 inch postcards in an imprinted box.

Chuck Close, a Flipbook

This large flipbook (4x larger than Fliptomania's standard books) uses smooth, mesmerizing animation to capture the work of master artist Chuck Close, revealing how his large scale paintings consist of colorful, abstract designs when examined in close-up, yet reveal virtually photo-realistic portraits when seen in full.

Chuck Close: A Retrospective