(born in Monroe, Washington in 1940)
Kate, 2014, signed, dated Chuck Close, coloured pigment print on wove paper, no 1 from the edition of 1, unique piece, sheet size 256.5 x 181.5 cm, image size 219.8 x 166.6 cm, framed under glass

Provenance:
Studio of the artist - acquired there directly by the present owner

„The most lethal thing in art is to follow established opinion. Anyone who painted in the 1970s was viewed as an idiot. Painting was dead. And the most stupid thing of all was to make portraits. So I thought to myself: hey, great! I won’t have much competition.“
Interview with Chuck Close, art magazine, 03/09, p. 54

For decades, Chuck Close has dedicated himself solely to portrait painting, although or precisely because he suffers from prosopagnosia, a phenomenon that causes the sufferer not to be able to recognise people by their faces. Close retrieves the faces in his memory and rasters them in order to activate for himself a particular type of image recognition. The variety of his working methods, printing techniques, collages and finger painting, offer the artist the best possibilities to deal not only with portraiture itself but also with the painting of signs. With different materials or methods, Chuck Close experiments anew every day, and his ideas develop during the working process. The grid templates, by means of which he overlays the large-scale portraits with squared latticework, enable Close to observe the effect of colour and materiality in an individual square, without „rolling back. (...) It’s a bit like composing a melody.
The composer doesn’t need a musician to write down his notes, he knows how the piece will sound.“ ART MAGAZINE, 03/09, p. 56

The portraits of his famous friends like the present work Kate Moss and the numerous self-portraits make Close himself into an artistic icon. Already in the late 1960s the first colossal, frontal self-portraits and portraits were created, images by which he burns himself into the memory of the viewer.
Close himself describes his colossal paintings as an agglomeration of everything seen and experienced. Chuck Close has compared the alterations of the template up until the completed work to an experiment with a constant, in which the effect of the variables is tested.

Dorotheum myART MAGAZINE (March 2014, Interview, p. 28): "Chuck Close, the art collector: Can we generally say that you collect faces?"
Chuck Close: "Right. I buy faces from all periods, but recently more of the Old Masters."

Provenance:
Studio of the artist - acquired there directly from the present owner

„The most lethal thing in art is to follow established opinion. Anyone who painted in the 1970s was viewed as an idiot. Painting was dead. And the most stupid thing of all was to make portraits. So I thought to myself: hey, great! I won’t have much competition.“
Interview with Chuck Close, art magazine, 03/09, p. 54

For decades, Chuck Close has dedicated himself solely to portrait painting, although or precisely because he suffers from prosopagnosia, a phenomenon that causes the sufferer not to be able to recognise people by their faces. Close retrieves the faces in his memory and rasters them in order to activate for himself a particular type of image recognition. The variety of his working methods, printing techniques, collages and finger painting, offer the artist the best possibilities to deal not only with portraiture itself but also with the painting of signs. With different materials or methods, Chuck Close experiments anew every day, and his ideas develop during the working process. The grid templates, by means of which he overlays the large-scale portraits with squared latticework, enable Close to observe the effect of colour and materiality in an individual square, without „rolling back. (...) It’s a bit like composing a melody.
The composer doesn’t need a musician to write down his notes, he knows how the piece will sound.“ ART MAGAZINE, 03/09, p. 56

The portraits of his famous friends like the present work Kate Moss and the numerous self-portraits make Close himself into an artistic icon. Already in the late 1960s the first colossal, frontal self-portraits and portraits were created, images by which he burns himself into the memory of the viewer.
Close himself describes his colossal paintings as an agglomeration of everything seen and experienced. Chuck Close has compared the alterations of the template up until the completed work to an experiment with a constant, in which the effect of the variables is tested.
Dorotheum myART MAGAZINE, March 2014, Interview, p. 28:

Chuck Close, the art collector:
Can we generally say that you collect faces?
Chuck Close: Right. I buy faces from all periods, but recently more of the Old Masters.