On View
Not on viewObject number1999.11
Phil/Fingerprint
Maker
Chuck Close
(American, 1940-)
Date1981
Mediumlithograph
Dimensionssheet: 50 × 38 in. (127 × 96.5 cm)
frame: 56 × 44 × 1 1/4 in. (142.2 × 111.8 × 3.2 cm)
frame: 56 × 44 × 1 1/4 in. (142.2 × 111.8 × 3.2 cm)
Credit LineArt Auction Fund in memory of Ethel Groos
Exhibition History"Large Format Works on Paper," KIA (July 22 - Sept. 27, 1999).
"Large Format Works on Paper," KIA Galleries 3&4 (June 27 - Sept. 2, 2003).
"Looking at the Portrait," KIA Galleries 2&5 (Apr. 23 - July 3, 2005).
"Highlights of the KIA Permanent Collection, (purchased with Auction funds)," KIA Gallery 5 (Sept. 9 - Oct. 14, 2006).
"Portrait and Presence," KIA Long Gallery (Apr. 16 - Sept. 18, 2011).
"Lasting Legacy: A Collection for Kalamazoo," Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (Sep. 6, 2014 - Jan. 4, 2015).Label TextI think a painter looking at a painting sees the image, but they also see how the image was constructed.
Chuck Close
Chuck Close really put himself into this representation of his friend, the contemporary composer Philip Glass. Over the years, Close reworked Glass’s portrait several times, in a variety of formats. Look at the various fingerprints and notice how each one is visible while standing close to the image, but at a distance, they blend together seamlessly to create Glass’s visage.
As an emerging artist in New York during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Chuck Close was consumed by the energetic, emotional works of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. At age 28, afraid of spending his career mimicking another artist’s style, Close abruptly reinvented himself. He limited his palette and used a grid process to unemotionally and meticulously reproduce Polaroid portraits of friends, family, or himself as large-scale paintings. Today, Chuck Close is one of the best known realist artists of
the 20th century. Close claims that having Prosopagnosia,
a condition that causes an inability to recognize faces, inspired him to focus on portraiture.
