Photo: Sotolux, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped). Credit: Own work, 2009. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Danoff.Close.Farnsworth.Pitt-723292.jpg
Chuck Close
Chuck Close (1940–2021) built faces from grids for fifty years — first the giant airbrushed photorealist heads, then, after the 1988 spinal-artery collapse that left him largely paralyzed ("The Event," he called it), the looser pixel-mosaic cells he painted with a brush strapped to his wrist. He could not recognize faces — lifelong prosopagnosia — which is part of why he painted them: flattened and gridded, a face became something he could hold onto. MoMA gave him a retrospective in 1998; Pace showed him from 1977 on. In 2017, multiple women brought well-documented sexual-harassment allegations against him and the National Gallery cancelled a planned exhibition — the late reckoning is part of his record too. Both works in this collection show Philip Glass, decades apart in method.
2 physical works
