“Self Portrait” by Chuck Close, a contemporary and photorealistic artist known for his larger-than-life portraits. From 1968 with his groundbreaking piece “Mark” (of the artist Mark Greenwold), Close has been creating these realistic portraits using grids to transfer the images to the canvas, compelled to make his most notable subjects by his need to commit faces to memory. In his earlier works, Close emulated the feeling of a photograph, not just making it look realistic but capturing characteristics produced from a camera like blurring out things further away from the face, as a real camera lens blurs the background of a photo. He works in a nontraditional manner by combining many small geometric forms, often using a collage of colorful shapes to define facial features, an example being this self portrait. The signed piece measures 65 inches tall and 54 inches wide.

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Chuck Thomas Close was born July 5, 1940 in Monroe, Wisconsin. His works, namely his portraits, are often associated with the Hyperrealism or Photographic Realism movements, which in response to Minimalism and Conceptual Art offer a link between painterly and photographic representation through a mechanical and detailed reproduction of reality.
The life and artistic trajectory of Chuck Close underwent a drastic change in 1988 when he suffered from spinal artery collapse and was rendered quadriplegic. Through time and perseverance, Close was able to continue painting by holding a paintbrush in between his teeth. He later gained more mobility in his hand to tape a paintbrush to it. Thanks to experimentation with different techniques and materials, Close’s result is still one of extraordinary realism.
In 1999 Close executed a series of photographic portraits using the technique of the daguerreotype, and in the course of the two successive years completed a series of photographs, which through particular use of focus and contrast between blurred and extremely detailed parts of the face immediately recalls his earlier paintings. He has been the subject of hundreds of exhibits in important museums and institutions.