|
Indepth Arts News:
"Chuck Close"
2000-12-09 until 2001-03-25
Worcester Art Museum
Worcester, MA,
USA United States of America
In a unique visual exchange between
the ancient world and the art of our time, the Worcester Art Museum presents Chuck
Close from December 9, 2000 to March 25, 2001. Inspired by Close's keen interest in
ancient floor mosaics, this show is the first to explore the relationship between his work
and mosaics of the past, and coincides with the Museum's landmark exhibition, Antioch:
The Lost Ancient City.
Organized by Susan Stoops, curator of Contemporary Art at the Worcester Art
Museum, Chuck Close features four major canvases from the past decade, including
images of fellow artists Joel Shapiro and William Wegman. A rarely exhibited silk rug
(the subject of which is artist Lucas Samaras) and two paper pulp pieces will also be on
view, including the Worcester Art Museum's Phil I, a well known image of composer
Philip Glass. A brochure with comments from Close about the relationship of his work
to ancient mosaics accompanies the exhibition.
For more than 30 years, Close has been a leading figure in contemporary art working
with a single subject-the human figure. Close's monumental portraits-or heads as he
prefers to call them-are often intensely personal images of friends and family,
distinguished by a degree of detachment that seems to border on the impersonal. Using
photographs of his subjects as references and variations of the grid to construct the
images in paint, each piece is both a highly abstract and systematic composition of
individual strokes and a finely rendered likeness of his subject.
Close's recent paintings are a departure from his earlier hyper-real renderings. Utterly
frontal and close-up, these images are constructed from hundreds of gridded squares or
diamond shapes filled with abstract passages of paint. During the past decade, his
experimentation with expectations of photographic focus has resulted in images that lose
focus at close range and dissolve into a mosaic of miniature abstract compositions.
According to Stoops: In both Close's works and the Antioch mosaics there is a tension
between the realism of the subjects depicted and the inherently flat, two dimensionality
of the individual units used to construct an image-painted grids in Close's works and
pieces of stone and glass (tesserae) in the mosaics. At the core of the viewer's experience
of these processes, which are separated by more than 1400 years, is a subliminal
awareness of individual units while the completed image of face or figures falls into
focus.
The order or structure that is at the heart of representational illusion is, in the case of
both Close's art and the mosaics, full of improvisation and artistic invention, Stoops
adds. Terms like 'realism' and 'representation' become relative and, whether a painting
or mosaic, we discover that the medium creates its own distinct reality.
In his paintings, Close moves systematically through an image, beginning a picture from
one corner and working toward the opposite one without losing a sense of the whole. He
frequently repeats his images from work to work, changing the scale or position of the
grid as well as shifting from painting to drawing, printmaking, or collage.
Like other artists of his Minimalist generation, Close reacted to the abstract
expressionist aesthetic instructions he received with 'distrust.' In the '60s, while
embracing the extra-large and confrontational format of 'action painting,' he abandoned
abstraction for the human figure and expressionist gesture for the systematic mark.
When comparing his recent work to the 'hands-off' airbrushed acrylic monochromes
that were his hallmark in the early works, Close's methods of painting has changed most
noticeably in terms of the brushed application of oil in either monochrome or full palette,
the larger, bold grid elements often set on the bias, and a bravura and abandon in terms
of gesture and touch.
Born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington, Close attended the University of Washington in
Seattle, and Yale University School of Art and Architecture. After receiving a Fullbright
Fellowship to study at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste in Vienna, Close began
working from photographs in 1965. He had his first solo show in New York's Bykert
Gallery in 1970. Close was the subject of a retrospective in 1989-99 organized by the
Museum of Modern Art. His work is included in numerous private and public
collections, including such prestigious institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of
Modern Art (NY), the Tate Gallery (London), and Musee national d'art moderne
(France).
Related Links:
| | 
|
