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15/4/2005

Chuck Close

Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC

Prints: Process and Collaboration

For more than 30 years, Chuck Close—renowned as one of America’s foremost artists in any media—has explored the art of printmaking in his continuing investigation into the principles of perception. This exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of the full extent of Close’s long involvement with the varied forms and processes of printmaking, and is the first comprehensive exploration of what can only be termed a prodigious accomplishment in the field. Featuring works dating from 1972 to 2002, Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration illustrates the artist’s range of invention in etching, aquatint, lithography, handmade paper, direct gravure, silkscreen, traditional Japanese woodcut, and reduction linocut. Highlighting the creative processes and technical collaboration between the artist and the master printers, the exhibition demonstrates how Close has consistently but variously challenged the accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. Taken together, these prints constitute a remarkable self-portrait of the creative drive, vision and intellect of one of America’s most important living artists.

In Close’s work, the topology of the human face becomes a series of gridded abstractions that, when assembled in the eye of the viewer, create an imagistic whole. Celebrated as a quintessential painter and photographer, Close has also mastered the unique artistic language of printmaking, a process that requires a special degree of trust and cooperation between the artist and the technician. The featured images that comprise the exhibition—self-portraits and portraits of subjects familiar across the spectrum of his artistic production—encompass the major forms of printmaking.

From the artist’s ambitious first mezzotint, Keith (1972), to his recent pulp-paper multiples, this exhibition chronicles the genius of Chuck Close in the medium in which he has done his most exciting work. While the production of a painting can occupy Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take more than two years to complete, from conception to final edition. The relationship between Close and the master printers is key to the success of his prints, as the artist insists on a decidedly interactive approach to their creation. Close has remarked, “Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me… My prints have been truly collaborative, even though control is something that I give up reluctantly.”

Terrie Sultan, director of Blaffer Gallery, writes in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “This project is entitled Process and Collaboration because those two words are essential to any conversation with Close about his prints. The creative process is as important to him as the finished product, and these works strive to reveal the routes taken to get to them. Showing the progressive and state proofs here along with the editioned works demystifies the artist’s decision-making process, allowing us to visualize how these complex images are made, how he was thinking when he made the mark.”

Following its presentation in Charlotte, the exhibition will travel to Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, CA; Bellevue Art Museum, WA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA.

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration was organized by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. The exhibition and publication have been generously underwritten by the Neuberger Berman Foundation. The exhibition was made possible, in part, by major grants from the Lannan Foundation and Jon and Mary Shirley, and by generous grants from The Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation and Houston Endowment Inc. Financial support has also been provided by Jonathan and Marita Fairbanks, Dorene and Frank Herzog, Andrew and Gretchen McFarland, Carey Shuart and The Wortham Foundation, Inc., with additional funds from Karen and Eric Pulaski, Suzanne Slesin and Michael Steinberg, and Texas Commission on the Arts.

Mint Museum
Randolph Road - Charlotte, NC

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