Chuck Close
Shirley, 2007
Oil on canvas
243,8 × 213,4 cm
‘I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person,’ – Chuck Close.
A legendary portrait painter Chuck Close suffered from prosopagnosia (face blindness) which rendered him largely incapable of recognising people. It had a major impact on his work – he wanted to commit images of friends and family to memory, immortalizing the people and faces.
‘Shirley’, 2007 depicts artist’s mother-in-law, Shirley Rose. Close’s first wife Leslie Rose Close recalls their first meeting with her parents:
‘I was so terrified of their first visit to our loft. We tried to camouflage the fact that there was no heat. Even after we got heat and for the next fifteen years, my mother never came to visit without keeping her coat on.’
Exhibitions
‘Chuck Close: Family and Others’. White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London. October 10–November 17, 2007. Traveled to: as ‘Chuck Close: Seven Portraits’, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, February 29–May 4, 2008. Illustrated in catalogues.
‘Chuck Close. Guild Hall Museum’, East Hampton, New York. August 10–October 14, 2013.
(Curated by Christina Mossaides Strassfield).
‘A Brief History of Place I’. Pace Gallery, Menlo Park, California. September 18–December 13, 2014.
‘Mutated Reality’. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. November 27, 2015–March 2, 2016.
Publications
Chuck Close: Seven Portraits. Exhibition catalogue. Texts by Mikhail Piotrovsky, Dimitri Ozerkov and Diarmuid Costello. Interview by Ingrid Sischy. London: Fontanka, 2008. pp.4-5, 41 (illustrated)
Finch, Christopher. Chuck Close: Work. Munich; Berlin; London; New York: Prestel, 2010; 2014. p. 313 (illustrated).
Mutated Reality. Exhibition catalogue. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, 2015. pp. 20, 23 (exhibition views), 25 (illustrated), 26-27 (detail), 61.
Chuck Close: Paintings, 1967 to the Present. Digital Catalogue Raisonné. Artifex Press, 2016
