Heesun Park reviews Close - self portrait

Close's effort to replicat photographic realism by hand also led him to abstraction. Close is known for his enormous portrait paintings, each based on a small photograph of the subject's head, captured straight on and with a deliberately blank expression. Close transfers the photographic image to canvas using a rather mechanical mural method, drawing a grid on both the photograph and the cavas, he fills in each individual box on the canvas in correspondence with the source image.