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Lot Essay
‘Christopher Wool is a painter by default and by defiance …’ (Bruce Ferguson)
Looping red lines twist and wind their way across Christopher Wool’s Untitled (2008). Standing over a meter in height, the work engulfs the viewer with its wild, irrepressible dynamism, each line its own potent force. Distinguished by its use of red pigment, the work’s vivid, pulsating marks evoke the graffiti that covered the streets of 1970s New York, when Wool moved to the city to study art at the Studio School. These years were formative to the artist, whose aesthetic refracts the grit and grunge of punk, New Wave, and other subcultures then sweeping the city. The present work evinces this same audacious energy that the young artist first encountered decades prior.
Coming to prominence at a time when painting was seen as outmoded, Wool focused on its avant-garde possibilities, and the immediacy of his hand is instantly apparent in the present work. Wool has long been fascinated by questions around process, and such explorations remain key to his practice as he interrogates how exactly to make a painting. He employs a variety of mark-making strategies, using readymade, utilitarian tools, such as house paint rollers and spray cans, and since 2000, has made erasure a consistent technique. As the story goes, Wool, frustrated with one of his paintings, hoped to remove some of his recent work by dipping a rag in turpentine and dragging it across the canvas’ wet surface. The movement failed to completely eradicate the offending mark, instead creating new swathes of variegated texture. In examples such as the present, Wool would add further layers of distortion, taking silkscreened fragments of multiple paintings and combining them into new works.
The work’s formal qualities of recall those of Jackson Pollock, both in the physicality of his approach as well as the ‘all over’ application of paint. Its use of the silkscreen, meanwhile—the artist’s primary tool since the 1990s—owes a debt to Andy Warhol. Improbably, Wool’s abstraction exists at the nexus of the two, a space where spontaneity and detachment both preside, and his practice is nothing short of a confrontation with Modernist strategies. In the present work, his virtuosic combination of gesture and self-appropriation serves to both affirm and negate the artist’s hand. In doing so, the painting presents a subtly layered and highly nuanced surface that deftly moves between chance and control, truth and illusion.
Looping red lines twist and wind their way across Christopher Wool’s Untitled (2008). Standing over a meter in height, the work engulfs the viewer with its wild, irrepressible dynamism, each line its own potent force. Distinguished by its use of red pigment, the work’s vivid, pulsating marks evoke the graffiti that covered the streets of 1970s New York, when Wool moved to the city to study art at the Studio School. These years were formative to the artist, whose aesthetic refracts the grit and grunge of punk, New Wave, and other subcultures then sweeping the city. The present work evinces this same audacious energy that the young artist first encountered decades prior.
Coming to prominence at a time when painting was seen as outmoded, Wool focused on its avant-garde possibilities, and the immediacy of his hand is instantly apparent in the present work. Wool has long been fascinated by questions around process, and such explorations remain key to his practice as he interrogates how exactly to make a painting. He employs a variety of mark-making strategies, using readymade, utilitarian tools, such as house paint rollers and spray cans, and since 2000, has made erasure a consistent technique. As the story goes, Wool, frustrated with one of his paintings, hoped to remove some of his recent work by dipping a rag in turpentine and dragging it across the canvas’ wet surface. The movement failed to completely eradicate the offending mark, instead creating new swathes of variegated texture. In examples such as the present, Wool would add further layers of distortion, taking silkscreened fragments of multiple paintings and combining them into new works.
The work’s formal qualities of recall those of Jackson Pollock, both in the physicality of his approach as well as the ‘all over’ application of paint. Its use of the silkscreen, meanwhile—the artist’s primary tool since the 1990s—owes a debt to Andy Warhol. Improbably, Wool’s abstraction exists at the nexus of the two, a space where spontaneity and detachment both preside, and his practice is nothing short of a confrontation with Modernist strategies. In the present work, his virtuosic combination of gesture and self-appropriation serves to both affirm and negate the artist’s hand. In doing so, the painting presents a subtly layered and highly nuanced surface that deftly moves between chance and control, truth and illusion.