Chuck Close

Self-Portrait

2007

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was a seminal figure in 20th-century British art, celebrated for his raw and psychologically charged exploration of the human form. With his distinctive figurative intensity, Freud captured friends, family, and lovers in a signature brand of realism that he refined over a seven-decade long career. The artist revitalized traditional portraiture in England by imbuing his images with visceral complexity and exposing his subjects in harsh, often unsettling poses that reveal their vulnerability. Freud's style is renowned for its striking emphasis on texture and physicality. His portraits are remarkably unsentimental and veer on harsh. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of his oeuvre is the artist's bold mastery of light and shadow. Freud accentuates every detail of his subjects with frenetic strokes and dramatic contrasts, carving out contours and imperfections with deliberate unflinching precision. Although Freud produced several prints early in his career, he took a 30-year hiatus before reconnecting with the medium in 1982. As with the rest of his practice, each etching demanded months of work and many sittings, deepening the intrigue and complexity of his printmaking. Completed in the last chapter of his career, "The New Yorker" offers a pared-back example of the artist's signature aesthetic. Freud captures his subject in a quiet moment of contemplation, his lips pursed...

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is arguably the most important American artist of the 20th century. He not only defined Pop Art but had an unrivaled influence on artists and image-making. ...

This signed and numbered self-portrait by acclaimed artist Chuck Close is a striking piece created to benefit the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. Known for his me...

A suite of four holograms by Chuck Close. "Self Portrait" is a contemporary artwork in a palette of blacks and blues by Chuck Close. Each piece measures 14 x 11 in. The work is editioned 16/23 with 2 PPs and is numbered CC(16)2. Chuck Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Throughout his career, Close has endeavored to expand his contribution to portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conte´ crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries. His early airbrush techniques inspired the development of the ink jet printer. Working from a gridded photograph, Close builds his images by applying one careful stroke after another in multi-colors or grayscale. He works methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas. His works are generally larger than life and highly focused. Close has been a printmaker throughout his career, with most of his prints published by Pace Editions, New York. He made his first serious foray into print making in 1972, when he moved himself and family to San Francisco to work on a mezzotint at Crown Point Press for a three-month residency. In 1986 he went to Kyoto to work with Tadashi Toda, a highly respected woodblock printer. In 1995, curator Colin Westerbeck used a grant from the Lannan Foundation to bring Close together with Grant Romer, director of conservation at the George Eastman House. The artist has also continued to explore difficult photographic processes such as daguerreotype in collaboration with Jerry Spagnoli and sophisticated modular/cell-based forms such as tapestry. Close’s photogravure portrait of artist Robert Rauschenberg, “Robert” (1998), appeared in a 2009 exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, featuring prints from Universal Limited Art Editions. In the daguerreotype photographs, the background defines the limit of the image plane as well as the outline of the subject, with the inky pitch-black setting off the light, reflective quality of the subject’s face. Close’s wall- size tapestry portraits...