Chuck Close On Sale

Chuck Close was renowned for his highly inventive techniques of painting the human face and was best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings.

After earning his MFA from Yale in 1964, Close took his place atop the American art world by creating large-scale, Photorealistic portraits that have creatively blurred the distinction between photography and painting. In 1988, Close was paralyzed following a rare spinal artery collapse; despite the physical limitations, the artist pressed forward with his work. With a brush taped to his wrist, he continued to paint.

In 2000, Close was presented with the prestigious National Medal of Arts by President Clinton and was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

"Yes, it is hard to paint blur," Close said. "There are some works I made by using a grid of string to help me perceive changes in depth of focus — something artists have done for centuries. The depth of field in the daguerreotypes is a function of the process of making an image that way, with a very short, very bright flash of light."

Although Close had employed various painterly styles throughout his career, he is perhaps best known for his grid set on the diagonal. Close’s paintings are all-over images where the background of the picture – the negative space – is as important as the face itself, and one cannot exist without the other.

Close often took his family and friends as models, making monumental and classical works that are bold in their simplicity. His work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions in more than 20 countries, including major retrospective exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia de Madrid and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

(Biography provided by Weng Contemporary – ArtXX AG)

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.