Chuck Close

Chuck Close was an American painter and photographer born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940, celebrated for his monumental, methodically constructed portraits that became among the most recognizable images in late twentieth-century American art. Raised in difficult circumstances — he was dyslexic and suffered from a neuromuscular condition and prosopagnosia (face blindness), which likely drove his lifelong focus on the human face — he studied at the University of Washington, Yale School of Art, and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s, where he developed his signature approach: working from photographs, he transferred images to large canvases using a grid system, building portraits of extraordinary size and detail.\n\nClose's early work, produced in airbrush and paint, was so photographically precise that it helped define the Photorealism movement. Over subsequent decades he continually reinvented his process, creating portraits from fingerprints, handmade paper pulp, and mosaic-like grids of abstract cells — each unit a small abstract painting, the overall image legible only at a distance. In 1988, a spinal artery collapse left him almost entirely paralyzed; he returned to painting using a brush strapped to his wrist, and the constraint paradoxically opened new directions in his work. He continued producing large-scale portraits of fellow artists, writers, and musicians until shortly before his death in 2021, leaving a body of work that interrogates perception, process, and the act of representation itself.