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Chuck Close, a leading figure in the New York art world since the 1970's, has had essentially one subject-the human face. These oversized, closely cropped images invite the viewers' attention: they look out at us while we stare back at them. In his early work, Close used himself, his family, and many of his friends as his subjects. More recently he has concentrated on portraits of his artist friends, including Elizabeth Murray, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson and Robert Rauschenberg.
Beginning in 1968, when he executed the first of his monumental heads, Close explored countless approaches to depicting his subject and has found new ways of challenging himself in the process. His early airbrushed black and white images were based upon his own photographs; these were followed by experiments with the three-color process derived from color printing; he then began to make airbrushed dot drawings, which utilized a grid of minute squares; he next experimented with finger-print drawings, in which he inked his finger and made an impression on the surface of the paper or canvas; these were followed up by pulp-paper collages on canvas; in his most recent works in oil, thousands of blobs, circles and facets fall into place next to each other shifting into a recognizable image. Robert Storr "Chuck Close"
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