Chuck Close focused on large-scale heads for most of his long career as an artist, varying his materials, but not his efforts, to make a person’s face into an overwhelming, impersonal presence. He made portraits of friends, family members, and models for many years, but he also created a number of self-portraits.
Close suffered a collapsed spinal artery in 1988, leaving him a quadriplegic, and in 1989—the year this self-portrait was made—he was finding new ways to make his artworks. For a long time, he only used photographs as reference material for his paintings and drawings, but by the late 1970s, he saw their potential to stand on their own as art. He was particularly drawn to large-format Polaroids and hyper-real images, like this one, where viewers may find themselves overwhelmed by the size and the visual information provided in the composite image.
The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges that, in 2017, several women accused Chuck Close of sexual harassment, though no charges were brought against him. The museum recognizes the positive and negative impacts that individuals represented in our collections have had on history.
