Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration examines Chuck Close’s long association with printmaking and innovative printing processes, focusing exclusively on the artist’s prints. Close made his first print as a professional artist in 1972. That year he began to push the boundaries of printmaking and has continued to do so for more than 30 years. Close wanted his prints to not be simply reproductions of his well-known paintings, but rather be separate investigations into a new arena of image making. His first printing process was mezzotint. From this first effort, Close learned a new language, that of working reductively rather than additively as in the painting process. He also had to work in reverse. This exhibition – a comprehensive survey of his prints – demonstrates why he is one of America’s foremost artists in any medium. Close’s prints combine remarkable technical skill with subject matter that is always more than it seems.

Close has been making images of faces for more than 35 years, and the subjects of these prints will be familiar to anyone who has seen his paintings. Close prefers the term “heads,” suggesting a formal distance from works that are titled by first names only. The heads are usually friends and family, and very often, himself. His prints demonstrate how his visual interests are formal: how scale, marks on the paper, and color affect perception. Close considers a face to be a roadmap of human experience. But “human experience” can refer beyond the landscape of the sitter’s face, to include Close’s own artistic experiences and the viewer’s own experience in looking. This exhibition suggests how Close’s roadmaps lead in many directions and how, over the past 30 years, Close has continued to examine various printing methods as he devises inventive new ways of building and dissolving images.

Close was born 1940 and grew up in Washington. As a child he was an excellent draftsman, understanding perspective and a realistic drawing technique at a precociously young age. Encouraged by his mother, he took private art lessons and of course, ultimately enrolled at Yale University’s prestigious M.F.A. program. He moved to New York City in the 1960s. In New York he began to paint the large nine-foot-high hyper-realistic paintings of heads of himself and his friends that have become, in many ways, iconic of his entire body of work.

Close has been making prints since 1972 as an ongoing facet of his artistic explorations, often taking years to complete a single print from beginning to final execution. Most of his prints include numerous screens, all of which have to be printed on the same sheet of paper, indicating the complexity of printmaking, as all the blocks and screens must be aligned perfectly on the paper. Often the large number of colors that Close uses even further complicates this process. For instance, the Ukiyo-e woodblock print Emma comprised 113 colors and took 27 separate woodblocks to complete. This exhibition includes individual states of prints, and some works that aren’t even technically prints, such as handmade pulp paper editions, a tapestry, and a silk rug, demonstrating that the word “print” cannot contain the many ways in which Close interprets and expands upon the medium. As he has done for over 30 years, Close breaks down any artificial boundaries between media and ideas.

Part of what is compelling in examining the prints of Chuck Close is the fact that his prints have always inspired his other work. Rather than being secondary, printmaking is itself a collaborative element in the entire body of this artist’s work. Close himself notes that everything that has happened in his other unique works can be traced back to his prints. Most significantly is an example from his first major print Keith/Mezzotint, 1972. In his paintings, Close historically uses a grid to transfer information from a photograph of a person to the canvas, but he always painted away the grid in the early works so that the paintings looked seamless. When Keith/Mezzotint’s plate began to wear away, the grid accidentally showed through. Close liked the effect so much that the grid soon became a visible element in all of his work. The grid showed the building blocks of the work, allowing the viewer to understand another element of the artistic process and production. Close then developed that idea and began to display many “building blocks” of checks, dots, fingerprints, and diamond-shaped boxes in his prints, paintings, and drawings.

A central component in Chuck Close’s work is that of collaboration. While painting is for him a solitary activity, printmaking is highly collaborative, allowing him to work with master printmakers who have their own ideas about artistic production and practice. There are chromists who choose and mix colors, block cutters, and screen printers, to name a few, who collaborate in printing processes. Another element of collaboration in his work is his collaboration with the photographic image of his sitters. Close creates all his portraits of the “heads” from photographs he has taken of the sitter. He understands the photographs are a snapshot of a moment in time. If he worked from a live model, he would be too aware of the passing of time, as a live model would, by nature, look different from one day to the next, if not from one hour to the next. A photograph arrests time’s passing, allowing Close to focus on the visual roadmap of human experience in which he is so deeply interested. Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration encourages us to examine this artist’s contribution to American art through his innovative processes and fruitful collaborations.