Chuck Close: The Grid

Chuck Close - Lucas I - 1986-87 - Oil and graphite on canvas - 100 x 84 in. (254 x 213.4 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkThe earlier works of Photo-Realist associated with American Photo-Realist Chuck Close (born 1940) are minutely detailed portrait heads he painted on a monumental scale in black, white, and gray. These works, factually rendered, magnified every pore and imperfection to unexpected and unnatural proportions.

Paintings such as “Lucas I" (featured here) depicts fellow artist Lucas Samaras, and are representative of Close's later, more colorful and painterly style. They go beyond the hyper-reality of his earlier portraits and elaborate on his pictorial investigation of the act of perception, breaking down the visual information into component parts that describe the actual process of seeing, not just the end result.” (MetMuseum)

“Photorealist painting of the 1970s celebrated the glossy, mirror-like "look" of the photograph, but after achieving that ideal, Close swiftly turned to portraiture, suggesting it as a means for exploring unsettling aspects of how self identity is always a composite and highly constructed, if not ultimately conflicted fiction.” (The Art Story)

My own appreciation for Close’s work lies in his reliance on (and appreciation of) the grid, as a fundamental tool of art-making, and a means for indepth artistic examination and expression.

Alex Katz: Crisp And Monumental

Alex Katz - Red Coat - 1982 - Oil on canvas - 96 × 48 in. (243.8 × 121.9 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)“Alex Katz, the 92-year-old artist known for a distinctive style of stark figurative painting and stylized landscapes he has refined since early studies dating back to the 1940s, will be the subject of a career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022.” (ARTnews)

During his long career, American artist Alex Katz (born 1927) has been associated with (and influenced by) a number of movements (such as Pop Art and Super-Relism [also known as Photo-Realism]), but he has made it a point to avoid any direct association with any of them. 

Katz has said, "I can't think of anything more exciting than the surface of things. Just appearance.” His work clearly attests to this notion, and embodies the clean lines of commercial art, as well as illustration and photography. That many of his works are monumental in scale underscores his affection for the basic elements of art.

The work featured here is a portrait of the artist’s wife, Ada, who has been a favorite subject of the artist throughout his life. “The best of Katz’s portraits create a palpable tension between specific and abstract, intimate and remote, near and far.” (Met Museum). Even in works as close-up as this one, the psychology of the sitter remains and enigma.

In addition to his portraits, Katz is also well-known for his monumental landscapes, largely based on sites in Maine.

Duane Hansen: It’s Alive!

Duane Hanson - Woman Eating - 1971 - polyester resin and fiberglass with oil and acrylic paints and found accessories - Smithsonian American Art Museum - Washington, DCAmerican figurative sculptor Duane Hanson (1925-1996) created lifelike figures made of cast fiberglass and polyester resin and dressed in everyday clothes. They often fooled the public into believing that they were viewing real people. Because of its faithfulness to reality, Hanson’s work is often categorized with that of the Photorealist painters of the same era, who based their paintings on photographic images.

Unlike the two-dimensional paintings, however, Hanson’s three-dimensional objects, life-size and realistic down to the hair on their arms, are uncanny in that they are simultaneously familiar in their lifelike appearance and yet strange as static works of art.

Hanson’s subjects of the late 1960s were political, including war, gang victims, and the homeless. Though he later tempered his political message, he continued to address the largely thankless roles of the working class—housewives, repairmen, office cleaners, dishwashers, museum guards, and janitors, whose bowed heads and vacant gazes reveal boredom and exhaustion.