Lot 2
  • 2

Christopher Wool

bidding is closed

Description

  • Christopher Wool
  • FUCKEM
  • signed, titled, dated 1992, and inscribed S87 on the reverse
  • enamel on aluminum
  • 52 by 36 in. 132.1 by 91.4 cm.

Provenance

Luhring Augustine, New York

Catalogue Note


In writing about Christopher Wool’s Word paintings of the early nineties, specifically those such as Fuckem which incorporates one of his best known longer texts, Ann Goldstein observed, “Stumbling and misarticulated in their composition, they are often decipherable only by reading the text out loud.” (Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Christopher Wool, 1998, p. 261).  In order to decipher a painting such as Fuckem, one is therefore obligated to verbalize the aggressive phrase, which comes out in a stuttered breath that mimics the artist’s chopped-up textual spacing. If one gets flustered realizing what he or she may have just said out loud, or by the awkward pacing at which he or she may have said it, the painting’s text becomes clear: the joke is on us, Wool’s viewers, and too bad if we can’t take it.

The work’s aggressive Naumanesque tone is highlighted by the work’s aggressive formal quality. The sprayed, slick, drippy and at times layered black-and-white image Wool has adopted as his signature style is evidence of his ongoing negotiation with and reconsideration of the history of abstract painting and painterly process. Stenciled, in a serial manner, with blank space at the bottom of the composition, the work also recalls, in its content and in its form, Warhol’s early serial silk-screens of celebrities and disasters. Madeleine Grynztejn argues, ``Wool’s work shares Pop Art’s affection for the vulgar and the vernacular, and in form recalls Pop’s graphic economy of means, iconic images, and depersonalized mechanical registration.” (Ibid, pp. 266-267).