artist profile
Chuck Close
born
1940
lives and works
Bridgehampton, USA
education
BA, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, 1962
MFA, School of Art and Architecture, Yale University, New Haven, USA, 1964
Honorary DFA, Colby College, Waterville, USA, 1994
Honorary DFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, 1995
Honorary DFA, Yale University, New Haven, USA, 1996
Honorary Doctorate, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA, 1997
about the artist
Portraiture has always been the axis of Chuck Close’s art. The assembly of faces he has portrayed over the years gives rise to a shared dialogue delving into the plights and joys of human existence. Within the genre of painting and photography, the artist has experimented with, reinvented, and conquered various approaches, processes, and methods, to a plethora of exhilarating effects. Strict photorealism, or hyperrealism, born of superb brushwork governed his earlier painting style; Close then managed to coalesce the representative with the abstract in his later works, elaborating upon his gridding system and maintaining the optical result of extreme verisimilitude. Close has enjoyed tremendous success since early in his career. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant by the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna, Austria, in 1965; his work was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as early as 1973, and was included in the Whitney Biennial of 1979. He has gone on to present many solo exhibitions and was offered grand retrospectives at prestigious American venues such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and others. The artist was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York, and later became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge. In 2000 the US government presented him with the National Medal of Arts.