Chuck Close: Self-Portraits

Throughout his career, American artist Chuck Close (b. 1940) reinvented portraiture, an often under-recognized genre in contemporary art. Although the artist used his family, friends, and fellow artists as subjects, he continually returned to his own image. This exhibition focuses on the artist's self-portraits examining them over approximately four decades. Using various media but starting with a single photograph, Close's painstaking process employs a systematic grid that he lays over the original portrait.

Through this method, the artist transfers his subjects onto a new surface and into a new medium. Beginning with the year Close moved to New York City and his first large-scale black and white self-portrait – the first of his paintings to enter a museum collection – the exhibition includes approximately 100 paintings, drawings, maquettes and other works on paper by this artistic innovator of both photography and portraiture.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Pressetext

Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005