Lot 11
  • 11

Christopher Wool

Estimate
1,200,000 - 1,800,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Christopher Wool
  • Untitled (P63)
  • signed, titled and dated 1988 on the reverse
  • alkyd and flashe on aluminum
  • 84 by 60 in. 213.4 by 152.4 cm.

Provenance

Luhring Augustine & Hodes Gallery, New York
Collection of Günther Förg
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Private American Collection

Condition

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is some variation in the application of the medium, due to the artistÂ’s working method. There are no visible condition issues with this work. Unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Catalogue Note

"Painting, for me, is often a struggle between the planned and the unforeseen. The best paintings are the ones that you could not have imagined before you began."
The artist cited in: Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, New York, 2008, p. 280

Christopher Wool’s Untitled (P63) is an exceptional work from an early period in the artist’s mature career spanning the late 1980s and early 90s. The present work affords highly revealing insight into the processes of construction and destruction of pictorial lexica and the scrutiny and reconsideration of conventions of painting that have formed the fundamental kernel of the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic enterprise. Through cumulative acts of reductionism and recapitulation, Wool has stripped down the essential facets of painting to engender a union of process with picture making. Vigorous gestures of abstraction have been limited to a purely monochrome palette and enshrined into a cool painterly distillation. Although the elegant, orderly pattern in Untitled (P63) suggests an appropriation from the annals of decorative history, Wool has denied the image its ability to be stripped and repurposed at will; the alkyd and flashe have literally burnt the pattern into the aluminum surface, fusing them irreparably.  

The allover orderly chaos of Wool's early abstracts is immediately evocative of Abstract Expressionist paradigms of Jackson Pollock, while the stark binary of black and white immediately calls to mind the strict chromatic polarity of Franz Kline. Meanwhile, Wool’s approach to media, re-presentation of found imagery, pictorial repetition and enlistment of typography as an aesthetic rather than semiotic agent also forges strong parity with Pop masterworks by the likes of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.
At a time when the prevailing trend in painting was set by neo-expressionist and Transavantguardia painting, Wool joined a small band of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen who dared challenge the status quo of painting from within the medium itself. As perfectly represented by the present works, Wool explored new possibilities by successfully addressing the contradictions and interrelation of abstraction and figuration. In a progression of series, from the preeminent stenciled word pictures to the corpus of purely abstract paintings, the artist explored reductive strategies informed by a myriad of art historical precedent. In order to visualize the general parameters of painting, content and composition within his oeuvre, his series of all-over abstractions employed the technique of drip painting, which also made reference to post-minimalized, procedure-based works that Richard Serra made by throwing lead. Wool's art draws together myriad precedent with sensational economy. His art does not merely strategize semiotic themes of signs and signifiers, but, as epitomized by these works, embodies Marga Paz's deft summary that "We are confronted with work that deals with the possibilities and mechanisms that keep painting alive and valid in the present, an issue that, despite all forecasts, is one of the most productive and complex issues in contemporary visual art." (Marga Paz, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Christopher Wool, 2006, p. 200)