Chuck Close “Recent Work”
The Pace Gallery (534 W 25th St)
This event has ended.
Pace announces Chuck Close: Recent Work, an exhibition of new oil paintings. A new catalogue with an essay by Nancy Princenthal will accompany the exhibition.
In his most recent work, Close continues his investigation of the grid as an organizational device, exploring minimal information processing in portraiture. Close abandons the expressionistic brushstrokes that have characterized his paintings since the 1990s. Rather, he applies multiple thin washes of paint in each cell of the grid, layering red, yellow and blue until they accumulate into extravagant full-color images.
The earliest works in the exhibition—portraits of Cecily Brown and Cindy Sherman—reveal the beginnings of this process, leaving the painting’s development visible.
Although the works represent a new direction for Close, they are also a revival and reconsideration of processes he first used in the 1970s when he first restricted his palette to three colors, coaxing different saturations of paint and hue into photorealist portraits.
When viewed up close, the portrayed subjects disintegrate into grids of color evocative of Paul Klee’s Magic Square paintings. These works attest to a heightened interest in the effects of color and suggest a new way of challenging the processes through which his portraits are constructed. It allows him to create distinct works from the same image through different saturations and juxtapositions of hue.
Media
Schedule
from September 11, 2015 to October 17, 2015