Getting up close to the work of Chuck Close at Sydneys MCA

With more than 200 prints on display, Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration is one of the biggest printmaking exhibitions to be held in Australia. The whole top floor of Sydneys Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has been given over to this show. Very early in his career, Chuck Close was provoked by a comment made by the most prominent art critic of the day in America, Clement Greenberg, that it was impossible to paint a face. As Close asserted in 1968, portraiture appeared as the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date and shop-worn of possible things you could do.