SAN FRANCISCO, CA.-The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005, on view through February 28, 2006. Produced in partnership with the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the exhibition was organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, and Siri Engberg, curator of visual arts at the Walker. The survey focuses exclusively on the artist’s self-portraits, consisting of more than eighty works in a broad range of media—painting, drawing, photography, collage, and printmaking—that trace the evolution of his process and self-examination from 1967 to the present. National sponsorship of Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005 is made possible by the global financial services firm UBS.

Through nearly four decades of “isms” and art movements, Close has remained committed to rigorous experimentation within a carefully defined practice, using his own image more than any other as subject matter. In examining this focused body of his work, Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005 highlights how an artist can create a remarkable pictorial language that continues to expand and develop over a lifetime. Celebrated as one of the most influential painters of our time, Close has retained his vitality by continuously reinventing portraiture, a genre often underrecognized in contemporary art.

Notes Grynsztejn, “Close is an artist whose vision was forged early on in a full-fledged synthesis of minimalist, conceptual, and process art practices, combined with an unapologetic image-making that has placed him at the center of vanguard art production since the mid-1960s. By zeroing in on Close’s own image, this exhibition presents a physiological record of a distinct human being as he changes through the years, from artwork to artwork, providing a universal entry into his oeuvre. As singular as Close’s features are, we nonetheless see them on a continuum with our own faces, and part of the power of these works comes from the recognition that our shared visages are given a respectful and even monumental force.”

The exhibition progresses in loosely chronological order and is framed by two major paintings separated by some thirty-three years: the Walker’s monumental black-and-white Big Self-Portrait (1967–68)—the artist’s first—and SFMOMA’s recent Self-Portrait (2000–01), a contemporary image painted as a mosaic of dazzling color and the only self-portrait painted on the scale of the 1968 canvas. Throughout the exhibition paintings will be paired with maquettes, and, in some cases, a series of works will be gathered together with the single maquette at its origin. As the viewer moves through the galleries, biographical time unfolds and the artist’s physical maturation is revealed in tandem with his artistic development. The final gallery highlights a suite of recent prints given to SFMOMA by the artist.

Born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940, Close attended the University of Washington in Seattle. From 1962 to 1964, he continued his education at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where he studied alongside a talented group of fellow artists including Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra. His paintings at the time were influenced by the work of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, but he remained dissatisfied with abstraction’s open-endedness. While in school, he traveled regularly to New York, became enthusiastic about Pop art, and began to feel an urgency about pushing his work in a new direction.

By 1967, Close had moved to New York City and abandoned the abstract work of his school years to begin painting from photographs. “I wanted something very specific to do, where there were rights and wrongs,” he has remarked, “and so I decided to just use whatever happened in the photograph. Whatever shapes were there I would have to use . . . I was constructing a series of self-imposed limitations that would guarantee that I could no longer make what I had been making.” The resulting cross-pollination between painting and photography would prove particularly fruitful and long-standing.

In 1968, Close completed the watershed painting Big Self-Portrait, his first self-portrait and the first of a group of eight black–and-white “heads,” as he refers to them, that include portraits of fellow artists Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, Joe Zucker, and the composer Philip Glass. Monumental in scale, at nine by seven feet, Big Self-Portrait is made from only a few tablespoons of water-based pigment, applied thinly so as to imitate the slick surface of its photographic source. This series of black-and-white paintings brought Close instant recognition as an artist and set the course for a working method he continues to use today.

Always starting with a photograph as the basis for his imagery, Close first produces a maquette, comprising a photograph overlaid with a grid template. He then systematically transposes the image to another surface—canvas, drawing paper, a printing plate, or a paper pulp collage—square by square. Thus, while the work always derives from photography, it is reinvested with the human touch present in the application method. Though his practice is well-defined, it is far from rigid: For each work he makes, Close consistently “alter[s] the variables.” Whether he fills each square with delicately airbrushed pigment, dots of pastel, inked fingerprints, etched lines, or organic brushstrokes in vibrant color, he continues “to find things in the rectangle and slowly sneak up on what I want . . . to make it all happen in the rectangle instead of on the palette and in context.” Close has used this method to produce works ranging from large-scale paintings to intimate drawings to elaborate paper-pulp constructions. In addition, he is a master printmaker who has worked with etching, woodcut, linoleum block printing, and screen printing. Examples of all Close’s techniques are included in Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005.