CHRISTOPHER WOOL | Untitled

Luhring Augustine, New York
Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Lucerne, Museum of Art Lucerne, Mixing Memory and Desire, June - September 2000

Christopher Wool, 9th Street Run Down, Göttingen 2001, n.p., illustrated

Condition: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is hinged to the backing board in two places on the upper edge and the vertical edges are slightly deckled. There are creases throughout the composition which appear to be original. Close inspection reveals a few minute, faint and unobtrusive media accretions in places. All other surface irregularities are likely to be in keeping with the artist's working process.
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Magnificently embodying Christopher Wool’s iconic lexicon, Untitled forms part of the artist’s celebrated 9^th Street Rundown series: distinctive, self-appropriative works that superimpose original forms onto prints of the artist’s former works. The series is primarily built upon technique and was first employed by the artist in 1998, to create fresh works through the layering of enamel and oil palimpsests onto canvases already bearing silkscreens of his older pieces. Collapsing any distinction of value between the original and the copy, the series also undermines the copy’s status as abstract; representing, as it does, the original work. The paint’s mode of presentation in 9^th Street Rundown ranges from diffuse splashes, as in the present work, to daubs of the sponge, dense drips of black and silvery grey, and rolled-on forms. The effect is of a painting of the painterly; abstracted from the cliché of spontaneous expression, Untitled exudes a tone that sits between the fervour of Abstract Expressionism and the cool indifference of Pop art. Wool’s painting began during the throes of critical debate, centred in 1970s, post-Conceptualist New York, surrounding the supposed death of the medium. A seemingly endless cycle of thesis and antithesis, the demise and resurrection of painting were proclaimed into being by critics such as Thomas Lawson and Douglas Crimp. Wool’s interest in the medium coincided with the rise of the Pictures Generation, who worked primarily with photography in an attempt to unveil the political relations latent in visual culture. Appearing to Wool to mistakenly presuppose a declarative, discoverable fact of the matter, photography appealed less to the artist than the seemingly intrinsic uncertainties and contradictions of painting. Since his own experience of identity was one of doubt and struggle - his experience of the New York street replete with the countercultural art punk aesthetic epitomised by iconoclasts such as Alan Vega - these properties of painting made it more, not less, befitting of capturing anything resembling truth.

And yet Untitled and the rest of 9^th Street Rundown remain deliberately evasive. Demonstrating Wool’s love of the medium of jazz – a relationship derived from his seeing the Ruscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1967 – the present work appears “uniform, deliberate, absolute, and masterful, but entirely resistant to one’s natural search for meaning” (John Caldwell cited in: Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, New Work: Christopher Wool, 1989, n.p.).