Phil/Fingerprint

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Close has used self-imposed limitations as a powerful tool in his art, noting that “The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before.” With his fingerprint works, the limitation seems extreme indeed—using only his fingertips to apply pigment or ink to create an image. Nevertheless, through his meticulous use of photography as a basis for his pictures, Close transforms this method, usually associated with childish imprecision, into a vehicle for intricate realism. From a distance, the images look like giant, heavily detailed photographs. Closer up, the surface dissolves into beautiful abstraction; a sea of fingerprints. The record of the artist’s touch is as direct as can be, but the pictures remain impersonal thanks to their relationship with the source photograph. This particular fingerprint work is a portrait of the composer Philip Glass, Close’s friend and one of his most famous subjects. Close first rendered this specific image of Glass in 1969, as a painting in acrylic on gessoed canvas. That was his earliest work to depict the composer, and since then, Close has created more than 100 different studies of Glass in a variety of mediums. A group of these were shown together by the Metropolitan Opera in New York in a 2008 exhibition titled Chuck Close Philip Glass 40 Years. While Close had completed fingerprint images of Glass in stamp pad ink on paper by the late 1970s, the work to be acquired here is a screenprint made in 2009.

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