Farewell to Chuck Close, the American photorealism artist.

U.S. artist Chuck Close, known for his large-scale photorealistic portraits, passed away yesterday in New York at the age of 81. He was among the leading American artists of his time, creating works that blurred the line between painting and photography. Born in Monroe, Washington state, in 1940, to artistic parents, he was trained first at Everett Community College and then at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he won a scholarship to study at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, which then opened the doors to Yale University. His figurative art research had started precisely from black-and-white photography, and his portraits, which characterized his production from the beginning, were one of the icons of experimentalism in painting in the 1960s.

His art has undergone several evolutions, although some features, such as the blurring and distortion of the human figure, have always accompanied his discourse: in fact, Close suffered from a cognitive disorder, prosopagnosia, which did not allow him to recognize people by means of physiognomic features alone: a defect thus became an artistic medium, since by means of the decomposition of his photorealistic portraits the artist achieved a fragmentation that forced one to grasp the coherence of the subject only by seeing him from a distance. Throughout his career he used a variety of expressive media: ink drawings, pastel and watercolor, painting (he often used acrylic colors), etching (etching, woodcut, silkscreen), collage, photography, tapestry, and mosaic. Close had continued to paint even after being stricken with a spinal problem in 1988 that forced him into a wheelchair.

Several awards have been won by Close, including as many as 20 honorary degrees, and several exhibitions of his work as well. The latest Italian exhibition is the one held from October 5, 2019 to January 12, 2020 at the Museo d’Arte della Città in Ravenna, where Chuck Close exhibited his mosaics and ceramics (the show, curated by Daniele Torcellini, was titled Mosaics). For Close also three participations in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995 and 2003) and numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world.

In the photo, Chuck Close at the 2019-2020 MAR exhibition in Ravenna.

Farewell to Chuck Close, the American photorealism artist.

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