All Photos By Gail
Artist Chuck Close is renowned for his highly inventive investigations into how we process information. Celebrated internationally, Close uses the absolute minimum amount of information necessary to render likenesses. In the new works for his sixteenth exhibition with Pace, entitled Red Yellow Blue , Close continues his involvement with the grid as an organizing device, creating full-color paintings out of only cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments, and layering colors in singular brushstrokes; applying multiple thin washes of red, yellow and blue paint in each cell of the grid, until they accumulate into extravagant full-color images.
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; however, this time the color has no relationship to reality.
Cindy, 2013
The earliest works in the exhibition — portraits of Cindy Sherman and Cecily Brown — reveal the beginnings of this process, leaving the painting’s development visible.
Cecily, 2013
Cecily, Detail
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 the arrtist to create distinct works from the same image through different saturations and juxtapositions of hue.
Chuck Close: Red Yellow Blue will be on Exhibit Through October 17th, 2015 at Pace Gallery, Located at 534 West 25th Street in the Chelsea Gallery District.
