American artist, Chuck Close (born 1940 in Monroe, Washington), is one of the top names associated with both Pop Art and Photo-Realism. He is known for his black and white grid face portraits, "heads" of people's faces that are not idealized, and since the late 1960s has been a mainstay of the contemporary art scene.

Biography
Chuck Close (1940 - )

Born in Monroe, Washington, Chuck Close is one of the top names associated with both Pop Art and Photo-Realism. He is known for his black and white grid face portraits, "heads" of people's faces that are not idealized, and since the late 1960s has been a mainstay of the contemporary art scene. He earned B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees with highest honors from Yale University and spent 1964 to 1965 in Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship. He taught briefly at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and in 1967 moved to New York where to 1971 he taught at the School of Visual Arts. He married Leslie Rose, a landscape historian, and they have daughters, Georgia and Maggie. Close became an admirer of Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothco, Jackson Pollock, and especially Willem de Kooning, but decided he could only do weak impersonations of their work. He followed his own desire to make original forms, to paint people the way a camera sees them, and he became the only one of his New York abstract artist circle using realistic images.

At first, he rejected color and the sensual qualities of paint and restricted himself to minimal elements of diluted black water-based acrylic paint, systematically applying it square by square to a grid. He based his work on photos he took of himself and his friends and would identify the painting only by the first name of the sitter.

In the 1970s, he experimented with collage and color, airbrushing acrylic paint and simulating the mechanical process of color-photo printing. In 1988, he suffered the collapse of a blood vessel in his spinal column, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined him to a wheelchair. But within a year, he resumed painting with brushes strapped to his right hand. He brings his subjects to his photo studio in SoHo where he makes large polaroids and then has an assistant place clear acetate and draws a grid. He works from the upper left corner systematically across the surface. He is a strong family man who tries to avoid celebrity status and celebrity portraits. He is adamant about keeping his work affordable for ordinary collectors. His first retrospective was in 1981 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and in 1998, another one was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Curriculum Vitae
Chuck Close

1940 Born in Monroe, WA on July 5
1963 B.F.A. Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
1964 M.F.A. Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
1965 University of Washington, Seattle, WA
1965 Fullbright Grant, Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna
1966 Resident Artist, The American Academy in Rome, Italy
2000 Awarded National Medal of Arts, Washington, D.C. USA

Selected Exhibitions
2004 Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration : The Met, New York, NY, USA
2004 Neue Editionen : Edition Schellmann, Munich, Germany
2003 Hyperrealismes USA, 1965-1975 : Strasbourg CMAM, Strasbourg
2002 Recent Paintings : Pace Wildenstein, New York, NY, USA
2001 Points of Departure : San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
2001 About Faces, C&M Arts, New York, NY
2000 The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000, Whitney Museum, New York, NY
2000 Chuck Close: Daguerreotypes : Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, Germany
1999 Portraits, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Chuck Close, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
1998 The Artist's Eye: Will Barnet Selects from the Collection, National Academy Museum, New York, NY
1997 Project Painting, Basilico fine Arts, New York, NY
1997 Project Painting, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, NY
1997 Systematic, Karen McCready Fine Art, New York, NY
1997 In-Form, Bravin Post Lee Gallery, New York, NY
1997 Photorealism's Greatest Hits, Louis K. Meiel Gallery, New York, NY
1997 Chuck Close: Large-Scale Photographs, PaceWildensteinMacGill, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, CA
1980 Printed Art: A View of Two Decades, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
1979 Copie Conforme?, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
1971 Recent Work, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA Rotating Exhibition, Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, NY

Statement
"From the very beginning, what I wanted to do was mitigate against the standard hierarchy of the portrait. " -Chuck Close