Chuck Close
Vast heads built square by square, by a painter who could not recognise a face.
Chuck Close was born in Washington State in 1940 with severe dyslexia and prosopagnosia — an inability to recognise faces — which is the reason he gave for painting them flat, from photographs, and very large. The early airbrushed black-and-white heads of the late 1960s are nearly nine feet tall and appear photographic at a distance. In 1988 a spinal artery collapse left him largely paralysed; he returned to work with a brush strapped to his wrist and made the late paintings, in which each cell of the underlying grid holds its own small loop of colour that resolves into a face only from across the room. He died in 2021.
Close was an unusually inventive printmaker and the print output is where most sellers meet the work: mezzotints, spitbite aquatints, woodcuts made in Japan, reduction linocuts, silk tapestries and handmade paper pulp pieces, many produced with Pace Editions in editions of thirty-five to eighty. Each process behaves differently and needs identifying precisely. The large paintings are few and are institutional. Allegations made against the artist in 2017 affected exhibition programming and are a known factor in the market.
If you own a work by Chuck Close
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