Harriet Zinnes
it is the human face that a viewer is interested in, then the artist Chuck
Close’s depiction of his own face, fascinating and inexorable, must be seen.
This comprehensive exhibition, a survey of the artist’s innovations in the
field of printmaking, will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, through April 18, 2004.
There
are approximately 100 prints being shown of working proofs and objects.
Close
(born in 1940) has always been an experimenter – from his first print Keith/
Mezzotint to his 2002 Emma,
style=’font-family:Verdana’>a 113-color Japanese-style woodblock print
that dazzles. Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan, has not
erred when he stated: “For the past 30 years Chuck Close has been producing
prints that astonish us with their technical virtuosity, daring extremes of
scale, and hallucinatory presence. While the opportunity to study the
step-by-step evolution of his printed works goes far to demystify the artist’s
working methods, it only enhances our admiration for his extraordinary
achievements in this medium.”
Seemingly,
Close has always been interested in larger-than-life images of the human face.
Even by l970 (he received his M.F.A. from Yale in 1964), he had attracted the
attention of the art world with his series of nine-foot-high,
hyper-realistically canvases of himself and friends. Close is more interested
than many artists in forms of visual perception. His “heads” (the artist’s term), conceived as what the
artist calls “gridded abstractions” may be to a viewer, however, more
figurative than abstract.
Close
is a restless artist. He can create a series of “spitbite” etchings or abandon
the grid system and use layers of doodle-like marks as in the 2000 Scibble/EtchingelSelf-Portrait.
In the exhibition the viewer can
also see this multifaceted artist’s examples of pulp paper multiples, a
technique in which an image is created by squeezing pulp in a range of varying
tints through a multi-part, metal matrix or into a mylar stencil.
Brilliantly
colorful silkscreens are shown, colossal in scale (the artist is addicted to
the large scale), and then there is the enormous unforgettable print of the
artist Alex Katz. Not to be ignored is the artist’s ukiyo-e
style=’font-family:Verdana’>print (namely, a 300-year-old Japanese woodblock
technique in which numerous separately carved blocks are fitted together to
create a single image) of the artist’s niece Emma
style=’font-family:Verdana’> (2002) with its colorful loops, dots, and
lozenges.
Terrie
Sultan, director of Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of
Houston, was curator of the exhibition. Nan Rosenthal, the Senior Consultant
from the Department of Modern Art at the Met, is the coordinating curator of
the exhibition.
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