Chuck Close Mixed Media

This silk jacquard weave is a striking self-portrait of the artist Chuck Close, one of the greatest living mixed media artists to work with massive photorealistic art. On one side is the artist in a standard grayscale perspective, on the other it is exposed reversal, showing the duality of our inner natures. Reversible and mounted in a plexiglass box that is hung on a metal frame. The tapestry is 51.25 x 36.75. This is signed by the artist and numbered 28 out of 150. Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington in 1940. Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs, using Photorealism or Hyperrealism, of family and friends, often other artists. He suffers from prosopagnosia (face blindness), and has suggested that this condition is what first inspired him to do portraits. Close attended Everett Community College in 1958–60 and was influenced by activist and journalist John Patric. In 1962, Close received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1961, he won a coveted scholarship to the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, and the following year entered the graduate degree program at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. Among Close's classmates at Yale were Brice Marden, Vija Celmins, Janet Fish, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Mangold, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold. After Yale, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. Close came to New York City in 1967 and established himself in SoHo. Chuck Close is globally renowned for reinvigorating the art of portrait painting from the late 1960s to the present day, an era when photography had been challenging painting's former dominance in this area, and succeeding in steadily gaining critical appreciation as an artistic medium in its own right. Close emerged from the 1970s painting movement of Photorealism, also known as Super-Realism, but then moved well beyond its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given subject to explore how methodical, system-driven portrait painting based on photography's underlying processes (over its superficial visual appearances) could suggest a wide range of artistic and philosophical concepts. Close's wall-size tapestry portraits...