With an artistic career spanning more than five decades, Close transformed the conventions of portraiture, redefining the academic canon and experimenting across a range of media—from Polaroid photography and oil painting to mosaic tilework and jacquard tapestry. His portraits were constructed through tonal grids built from fingerprints, pointillist dots, brushstrokes, paper pulp, and countless other materials.

Close received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington in 1962. Initially immersed in abstraction, he radically shifted his style after graduating from the Yale School of Art in 1964, embracing photorealism. Using large-format Polaroid images, he began transferring them to canvas with unprecedented precision. His first solo show took place in 1967, and in 1971 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a major exhibition of his black-and-white portraits, marking his emergence as a defining figure of contemporary art.

By the late 1970s, Close became one of the first artists to use the camera not only as a preparatory tool but also as an autonomous medium. His signature method involved overlaying a grid on a photograph and systematically transferring it, cell by cell, onto monumental canvases. Within each cell, concentric strokes of color built intricate optical effects that relied on “optical blending”—a phenomenon in which the human eye merges neighboring hues into a unified tone. At the micro level, the eye processes each fragment of color; at the macro level, the grid dissolves into the recognizable image of a human face.

“To observe Close at work on one of the grid portraits is like watching a man patiently working his way through the world’s largest crossword puzzle. As the painting approaches completion, it’s as if the crossword has been miraculously transformed into biography, the components finding syntax that gives them cumulative meaning.”

— Christopher Finch