Christopher Wool

Simon Lee Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne 2008, p. 367, illustrated in colour
Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne 2012, p. 344, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the tonality of the sheet tends more towards a true white. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in several places. There are artist's pinholes in all four corners. The vertical edges are slightly deckled.
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Throughout his career, Christopher Wool has consistently and successfully persevered in exploring and expanding the boundaries of painting, a medium whose death was proclaimed in the early 1980s, just as the artist was taking his first artistic steps. From the very outset, Wool has focussed his attention on the process of painting rather than on its subject matter, using both traditional methodologies and unorthodox techniques in equal measure and adeptness. In his highly innovative practice, Wool marries seemingly antagonistic influences and procedures to create a sensational body of work. His paintings are characterised by the combination of gestural marks - indexical of the artist’s hand, and often seen as relating to Abstract Expressionism - and mechanical means of reproduction that include house-painting rollers, rubber stamps and, more recently, silkscreen printing and even computer programmes.

It is these latter forms of production that the artist has chosen for Untitled (D312), in which multiple screens have been layered and then overlapped with enlarged blots of black paint and looping lines in a palimpsest-like composition. Here, Wool skilfully blends the detached, controlled aspects of silkscreen printing with the energetic, immediate and urgent pace of the lines that intertwine and coil directly on top of it. In a manner characteristic of his mature work and arguably reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s late Retrospective Paintings, the artist often uses his own output as the source material for his silkscreens, revisiting it and often using enlarged details that accentuate the abstract nature of the originals. As his friend and fellow artist Jutta Koether describes, Wool’s prints “picked up painterly fragments from the big pictures, recognize elements in them, and tell them of their outer limits. Through their displacement, new rhythms were introduced” (Jutta Koether, ‘Adequacy, No! On the Process of Productive Perversion or Defacement: The Paintings of Christopher Wool’ in Parkett, No. 83, 2008, p. 160). Indeed, in its amalgamation of black and white screens and twirling lines, Untitled (D312) is a wonderful example of the acclaimed artist’s ability to incorporate the lively rhythm of his own painterly gestures to the repetitive cadence of the silkscreening process.