Floor 4: Chuck Close: Southeast entrance from Serra
This QR code provides access to 7 artworks in this gallery.
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Objects in This Gallery
7 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Wall Text
1994
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000
Close had admired the subject of this painting, the artist Roy Lichtenstein, since his student days. Here he transforms Lichtenstein’s signature style into his own visual vocabulary. Like Lichtenstein’s benday dot paintings (on view nearby), the individual gridded units that form Close’s work can be appreciated in their own right and also make up a larger image.
Wall Text
1994
Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid), ink, graphite, and masking tape on foamboard
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2001
Close had admired the subject of this painting, the artist Roy Lichtenstein, since his student days. Here he transforms Lichtenstein’s signature style into his own visual vocabulary. Like Lichtenstein’s benday dot paintings (on view nearby), the individual gridded units that form Close’s work can be appreciated in their own right and also make up a larger image.
Wall Text
1998
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
“Superhuman” is how artist Agnes Martin—whose work is on view nearby—described this portrait of her when she first encountered it at an exhibition in Taos, New Mexico. Close’s giant, colorful painting of his friend is also an homage to Martin’s use of the grid, a form that was essential to both artists’ work. Here, the cells form individual paintings that spread, mosaic-like, across the canvas. Together, the individual abstract units gather force to present Martin in a way that is both sensitive and monumental.
Wall Text
1998
126-color screenprint, ed. 2/80
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
This work depicts the sculptor John Chamberlain, whom Close met in New York in the late 1960s and whose work is on view nearby. Close translated his own earlier painting of the artist into this 126-color screenprint with the aid of a master printer (a professional who helps artists create their fine-art prints). In a painstaking two-year process, each color was forced through its own unique stencil, made by painting emulsion onto a fine mesh screen.
Wall Text
1993
Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid)
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
Wall Text
1995
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
In addition to older artists and members of his own generation, Close also depicted younger artists whose work he admired, such as Lorna Simpson. Simpson first emerged in the early 1990s with works that combine photography and text to explore representations of gender, race, and identity. With its highly diagonal grid and irregular blobs of paint, Close’s painting calls attention to how it was made and reminds us that all representations, regardless of medium, are constructed—never purely objective.