Artworks

Chuck Close

American, b. 1940

Lucas/Rug, 1993

Hand knotted silk on linen warp

79 x 66 in. (200.66 x 167.64 cm)

Gift of Kathleen and Gregg R. Narber '68, 2011

Chuck Close, one of the foremost (certainly one of the most famous) portraitists of the past half century, combined size and unflinching (one might say merciless) realism to exemplify a concept of confrontation in the genre of portraiture. Here, the crazed face of the artist Lucas Samaras is not so much presented to us as set upon us. Close's application of a signature pixelization of the image seems dispatched to simultaneously disarm and hypnotize the viewer, while hardly aggrandizing Samaras himself.