C hristopher Wool's Untitled from 2000 is a masterful example of the artist's unbridled exploration of abstraction. Imbued with the artist's strikingly vibrant and signature pink hue, this iconic composition was the inspiration for the band Sonic Youth's 2006 album cover, "Rather Ripped." Wool's application of the iconic pink hue is evident in one of his early and most prized examples, I Can't Stand Myself When you Touch Me from 1994, is prescient to Untitled, with its dynamic overlaying and rolling of pink as the centrifugal force within the composition. Untitled is further notable as the critical inflection point of aesthetic and development for Wool, who debuted his new body of work at the Vienna Succession the following year. Since the onset of his career, Wool has reassessed and expanded on the process of painting, refining elements of Abstract Expressionist action, exploring the production techniques of urban industry, and grappling with concepts of authenticity. Here, along with the other gestural works comprising this seminal series, the artist confronts the notion of authorship head on.
Beginning in 1998, Wool started his first “painted silkscreens” in which he used his own paintings and studies as the foundation for others, blurring the line between primary work, copy, and new composition. Springboarding from Warhol’s incendiary use of photographic screen printing, Wool transfers works wholesale to new canvases, repainting them via silkscreen and building superstructures atop them. Adding subtle motion or grand movement with each iteration, Wool creates a dizzying narrative, confounding the idea of where one work ends and the other begins. The present work is thus a seductive and rarefied example as the only all-pink composition by the artist, that ingeniously challenges authorship, authenticity and identity in art through the signature technique of appropriation.
“Wool’s compositions spring from the hungry spirit of the urban landscape, the weedy nature of the vacant lot…Wool takes prettiness and jacks it up until Marshall amp level distortion sets in. This amp goes to eleven. You’re in Sonic Youth territory where the composition seems to swarm, gathered within the borders of the canvas as if by magnetic force or biological imperative.”
In Untitled, cascading pigment ripples down the surface, creating an overwhelming sense of immediacy and impact for the viewer. Like a single splash of paint blown to explosive proportions, Wool re-examines the most primary motions of abstract art on a grand scale. In focusing on the most rudimentary principles of abstraction, the paint itself takes on a vivaciousness and vigor, drawing away form the artist and towards the act of painting. The striking pink hues compel the viewer to follow the flow of the pigment on the surface, exploring the movement of this work. There is a sense of rawness that permeates the composition; sprawling tendrils of color that seep down the rice paper imply the unrestrained impulse of a single artistic gesture.
