The Orange County Museum of Art brings to Southern California prints by renowned artist Chuck Close. Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration, which has received an overwhelmingly positive response from the public on its national tour, showcases more than 100 works and demonstrates the highly technical and magical prints created by Close. On view January 28 through April 22, 2007, the exhibition is accompanied by lectures, family events, and other related activities.

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration explores the art of printmaking and the artist’s continuing investigation into the principles of perception. This exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of the full extent of Close’s long involvement with the varied forms and processes of printmaking, and is the first comprehensive exploration of what can only be termed a prodigious accomplishment in the field of graphic art.

“It is exciting to present a major Chuck Close exhibition in Southern California, especially one that offers new insights into the working process of an American master,” said OCMA Director Dennis Szakacs. “Visitors will appreciate the great skill and craft, as well as the emotional complexity of the work.”

Featuring 118 works dating from 1972 to 2002, Chuck Close Prints illustrates the artist’s range of invention in etching, aquatint, lithography, handmade paper, direct gravure, silkscreen, traditional Japanese woodcut, and reduction linocut. Highlighting the creative processes and technical collaboration between the artist and the master printers, the exhibition demonstrates how Close has consistently but variously challenged the accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. Taken together, these prints constitute a remarkable self-portrait of the creative drive, vision, and intellect of one of America’s most important living artists.

In Close’s work, the topology of the human face becomes a series of gridded abstractions that, when assembled in the eye of the viewer, create an imagistic whole. Celebrated as a quintessential painter and photographer, Close has also mastered the unique artistic language of printmaking, a process that requires a special degree of trust and cooperation between the artist and the technician. The featured images that comprise the exhibition—self-portraits and portraits of subjects familiar across the spectrum of his artistic production—encompass the major forms of printmaking.

From the artist’s ambitious first mezzotint, Keith (1972), to his recent pulp-paper multiples, this exhibition chronicles the genius of Chuck Close in the medium in which he has done his most exciting work. While the production of a painting can occupy Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take more than two years to complete, from conception to final edition. The relationship between Close and the master printers is key to the success of his prints, as the artist insists on a decidedly interactive approach to their creation. Close has remarked, “Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me… My prints have been truly collaborative, even though control is something that I give up reluctantly.”