Alex Katz

Description

During the 1970s, Chuck Close earned a reputation as a painter of large-scale, minutely painted portraits blown up on a grid from specially taken photographs. In December 1988, however, the artist suffered a collapsed spinal artery which left him a quadriplegic. Since then he has worked with heroic effort to regain strength and mobility. Confined to a wheelchair, he paints on a movable easel with arm supports.
Close's first work after the onset of his illness, executed in a hospital bed, was a small portrait of his friend, the painter Alex Katz. This painting, itself made from a photograph taken in 1987, served as the basis for Alex, a woodblock print made in close collaboration with the Japanese printer, Keiji Shinohara. Katz is known primarily as a portraitist who paints in a radically simplified and monumental style.
Close has always admired the size, ambition, and overall nonhierarchical texture of Abstract Expressionist paintings. In this work the artist has sought to retain this quality but to replace the personalized, gestural aspects Abstract Expressionism with representation. Over the years, Close's work has evolved from an almost mechanical precision to an increasingly direct, personal, and more painterly style. This evolution towards freer, broader handling is particularly evident in the work since his illness. Close's recent work seems warmer and more engaged that his earlier efforts.
Sean Ulmer, "A Matter of Degree" 11/2001