Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Selected works from the sixth-floor entry gallery appear in this section.

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To make Lyle, Chuck Close took a large-format Polaroid photograph of fellow artist Lyle Ashton Harris. Then he applied a diagonally oriented penciled grid to the image, dividing it into small diamond-shaped units. Close transposed the photograph onto a canvas overlaid with a larger but otherwise identical grid, painting every diamond individually. Viewed up close, each diamond looks like a small abstract painting of multicolored and irregular concentric rings. From a distance, however, the colors, shapes, and lines coalesce into a depiction of Harris. Close began painting large-scale heads in the late 1960s, at a time when figuration was out of step with the then-dominant interest in abstraction. In fact, he recounted that “the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of possible things you could do was to make a portrait." Close embraced the freedom for innovation that came with working in an unpopular genre, and for nearly five decades he has demonstrated new possibilities for conveying a sitter’s likeness.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Entry Gallery, Floor 6

9

LYLE, 1999

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Entry Gallery, Floor 6

9

LYLE, 1999

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection