Christopher Wool

Luhring Augustine, New York
Private Collection
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Extended Loan, October 2011-June 2012
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Transforming the Known, June - September 2013

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
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Composed in characteristic fashion of an array of black stamped patterns co-mingling on a stark white surface, Christopher Wool’s towering On the Corner is the epitome of the artist’s inquiry into the destruction of the conventions of painting. At nearly nine feet high by six feet wide, the present work engulfs us with its physical presence, boasting a magnificent display of richly variegated patterns and shapes. Isolated dots, crisscrosses and circles at the outer edges of the canvas give way to a swirling, looping mass of densely layered forms at the center, making for a composition that is simultaneously utterly still and fully dynamic. Wool’s black and white paintings are evocatively multifaceted yet reductive of tradition: heavily influenced by the ‘allover’ compositional strategy of Jackson Pollock; the minimal palette, line and gesture of Brice Marden; and mediated by Andy Warhol’s integration of mechanical methods. As expounded by Ann Goldstein: “from the beginning, Wool sought to make traditional paintings that did not look like traditional paintings …he eliminated everything that seemed unnecessary, rejecting color, hierarchical composition, and internal form.” (Ann Goldstein, “How to Paint” in Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2008, p. 185) The unity of painting and process is thus made manifest in the present work, in which the remit of expression resides in the layering, register, overprinting and variance of the pigment application.

At a time when neo-expressionism and Transavantguardia defined the prevailing aesthetic of the 1980s, Wool, alongside a small enclave of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, scrutinized the role of painting from within the medium itself by creating bodies of work that were inherently self-reflexive and deeply aware of art historical convention. These artists explored new possibilities by embracing failure and parodying archetypes of painterly expression. Wool’s paintings are condensed to the limited palette of black and white enamel applied to a canvas ground, the flatness of the surface, and the erasure of verisimilitude and privilege of semiotic distillation, rendering a myriad of art historical precedent with sensational economy. On the Corner is defined by the schema of painterly omissions or ‘glitches’ that disrupt the decorative pattern that it presents. The effect is one in which Wool invokes the associative potential of decorative imagery for his scrutiny of contemporary painting; as presciently observed by Gary Indiana for the Village Voice in 1987: “Their decorative qualities are deceptions. The eye doesn’t linger in one place or rove over them registering choice bits, but locks into contact with the surface and freezes …They exercise an almost hideous power, like real mirrors of existence.” (Gary Indiana, The Village Voice, March 1987, cited in Ibid., p. 48)

On the Corner continues to maintain a forcefully discursive relationship with art history, a precedent established with Wool’s earliest abstract works. The sweeping, swirling rhythm of the present work’s dominant pattern is powerfully evocative of the Abstract Expressionist paradigm of Jackson Pollock, while Wool’s insistence on a palette restricted to black and white recalls the chromatic polarity of the best of Franz Kline’s paintings. Meanwhile Wool’s approach to media, recapitulation of found imagery and pictorial repetition forges a strong parity with Pop masterworks by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Nonetheless, taking on a level of disconnection even further removed from the dispassionate repetition of morbid scenes in the Death and Disaster series, Wool is cooler, more reticent even, than Warhol. John Caldwell explains: “Since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting.” (John Caldwell cited in Ann Goldstein, Op Cit., p. 185) As impeccably demonstrated by the present work, Wool addresses these concerns via a heavily reductive erasure of both abstraction and figuration from which he may then return and intervene: “You take color out, you take gesture out – and then later you can put them in. But it’s easier to define things by what they’re not than by what they are.” (the artist cited in Ibid.) Thus On the Corner melds an ironic, appropriationist detachment with the language and strategies of abstraction in an effort to comment on the very nature of the genre.

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. In a progression started with the roller and rubber-stamp paintings, through to the stenciled text pictures and the most recent corpus of silkscreened gestural abstractions, Wool has explored a mutating, visually arresting landscape of seemingly mechanical, cipher-like reductions; coolly detached and emptied of heroic angst. Epitomizing Wool’s visual restraint, On the Corner embodies Marga Paz’s deft summary that “We are confronted with works that deal 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 in Exh. Cat., Valencià, IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Christopher Wool, 2006, p. 200)