Chuck Close - Art Card: Fanny/Fingerpainting (Hand signed by Chuck Close)

Chuck Close

Art Card: Fanny/Fingerpainting (Hand signed by Chuck Close)

This card was published by the National Gallery of Art, and depicts his painting Fanny/Fingerpainting which is in the museum's permanent collection. What makes it a coveted collectible is that it is boldly signed by Chuck Close in marker on the bottom. It has been elegantly float framed in a museum quality wood frame under UV plexiglass.
Measurements:
Framed
11 inches (vertical) by 9.5 inches (horizontal) by 2 inches
Card:
6 inches (vertical) by 4.25 inches (horizontal)
Below is a description of the original painting this card depicts:
Fanny/Fingerpainting, a portrait of Close's grandmother-in-law, represents one of the largest and most masterly executions of a technique the artist developed in the mid-l980s. That technique involved the direct application of pigment to a surface with the artist's fingertips. By adjusting the amount of pigment and the pressure of his finger on the canvas, Close could achieve a wide range of tonal effects. Typically, he worked from a black and white photograph which he would divide into many smaller units by means of a grid. He then transposed the grid onto a much larger canvas and meticulously reproduced each section of it. The result is a monumental, close-up view that forces an uncomfortable intimacy upon the viewer.
Seen from a distance, the painting looks like a giant, silver-toned photograph that unrelentingly reveals every crack and crevice of the sitter's face. Closer up, the paint surface dissolves into a sea of fingerprints that have an abstract beauty, even as they metaphorically suggest the withering of the sitter's skin with age. The fingerpaintings provide a far more literal record of the artist's touch than most abstract expressionist brushwork -- but are at the same time dictated by an abstract, distinctly impersonal system.

More about Chuck Close:
Chuck Close is known for his innovative conceptual portraiture, depicting his subjects, which are transposed from photographs, into visual data organized by gridded compositions.
Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Close used art as a means of navigating a learning disability. He continued to develop his artistic skills through private art lessons, drawing and painting from live models. As a student at the University of Washington (BA, 1962), and then at Yale (BFA 1963; MFA 1964), he began to emulate the styles of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, considering himself a third-wave Abstract Expressionist and as he explored this vocabulary he pivoted from biomorphism to figuration.

After studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1964) on a Fulbright grant, Close returned to the United States in 1965. He taught painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he received his first solo exhibition in 1967. Seeking to break from the gestural style that had characterised his student work, Close shifted toward Pop-inflected figuration before embracing the tools of commercial art and illustration. Basing his paintings on photographic imagery, Close reduced his palette to black and white, culminating in his large-scale painting Big Nude (1967). His 1967 solo exhibition featured paintings of male nudes, proving controversial and ultimately resulted in a landmark court case that sought to extend freedom of speech to the visual arts.
-Courtesy of PACE Gallery