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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > July > 27
Monday, July 27, 2009
Getting close to Chuck Close
Chuck Close redefined the way we consider portraiture. Beginning in the 1960s Close started creating massive painted portraits with a distinctive photorealistic style, typically using photographs as source material.
The super-large scale and hyper detail of Close’s portraits — many are of his artist friends such as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Andres Serrano and Cindy Sherman — forces a reconsideration of our assumptions of what a painted portrait should, or can, be. Sometimes, people are all too human up close.
Close’s use of photographic source material led to his experimentations with photography as an artistic medium, something the artist has deeply explored in the last decade.
‘A Couple of Ways of Doing Something’ an exhibit coming to the Austin Museum of Art. The exhibit opens Aug. 22 and runs through Nov. 8. Among the programs offered is a Sept. 10 screening of ‘Portrait of Close’s Creative Circle,’ a film that examines the artist and his circle of creative friends, including Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Kiki Smith.
The exhibit features 15 daguerreotypes — which Close used as the basis to create the other works in the show — 20 digital pigment prints, seven 8-by-6-foot digital Jacquard portrait tapestries and two photogravures measuring over 47 x 40 inches. Lyrical praise poems by New York School poet Bob Holman accompany many of the portraits. Holman, a celebrated poet originated the now famous Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He now runs the Bowery Poetry Club.
The exhibit is organized by Aperture, the New York-based not-for-profit organization devoted to photography. See www.amoa.org for details.
Image: Philip Glass, 2006 digital orint. ©Chuck Close
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