Chuck Close

Charles Thomas Close (Chuck Close) is an American artist and photographer born in 1940. He lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York.

He is famous for his rendering of human faces in his paintings and especially for his large-format photorealist portraits. He is one of the most important representatives of American hyperrealism in the 1970s and pixelated portraits are his signature style.

He has been paralyzed since 1988 but he continues to paint using a brush attached by a harness to his wrist, and foot pedals to move his canvases up and down. His practice goes beyond painting, encompassing photography, printmaking and tapestry created after polaroids.

Chuck Close's models are his friends, members of his family, artists and himself. He paints large-format portraits using a grid to reproduce photographs in pixelated form to achieve a photorealistic effect when seen from a distance.

His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Parrish Art Museum (Water Mill, 2015), The Merchant House (Amsterdam, 2015), Contessa Gallery (Cleveland, 2015), Childs Gallery (Boston, 2013), or White Cube (London, 2013).

He received the National Medal of Arts in 2000. He is an member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the National Academy of Design. In 2010 he was appointed by Barack Obama to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.