Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005

A prolific and celebrated artist, Chuck Close has worked for decades within a carefully defined practice focused exclusively on portraiture. Close’s own image, more than any other, is the touchstone to which he regularly returns. Starting with a source photograph, he carefully transposes his image to a canvas or other surface using a grid. Cross-referencing painting, drawing, photography, collage, and printmaking, the resulting works are truly hybrid objects that merge manual and mechanical processes and explore boundaries between the personal and the social, the subjective and the systematic, the abstract and the representational. This richly illustrated publication presents eighty-five of Close’s self-portraits in a range of media. Accompanied by illuminating essays by curators Siri Engberg, Madeleine Grynsztejn, and Douglas R. Nickel, they highlight the trajectory of Close’s pictorial language over a lifetime, tracing the evolution of his process from 1967 to 2005.