Two Part Self-Portrait

Chuck Close makes monumental portrait paintings based on photographs, following the same procedure each time: he covers a closely cropped photograph in a grid and then replicates the source image at a larger scale. After becoming partially paralyzed in 1988, the artist deepened his engagement with photography, as he explored potentially painterly results in a finished photograph. This 20 × 24–inch Polaroid diptych gives us a portrait of the artist as a two-part fragment, like two panes in one of his gridded paintings.