Christopher Wool

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

This painting is in very good 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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Manifesting an intricate vision of painterly virility, Christopher Wool’s subversively enthralling Untitled is at once an enveloping sensory experience which solidifies the relevance of contemporary painting, and a technically astute thesis on the creative weight of the medium’s rich history. As a signature autograph of this revered series, a free flowing line of whimsical spray paint maneuvers across a thick impasto surface, saturated with dense references to the varied technical species that constitute painting’s historical genera. With the harsh stamping of standardized patterns aggravated, memorialized and effaced simultaneously by the repetitive rhythm of a slick white gloss, Wool balances the mechanical and the visceral, endowing the surface with layered excess and eventual erasure. Through echoes of the contrasting visual modes of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, the artist summons the greatest progenitors of twentieth-century painting and encapsulates a scintillating vision of refined aesthetic energy. Above all, Wool excises painting from the shadows of its historical forbears. As a powerful proponent of his revered abstract monochrome paintings on canvas, Untitled thus stands as a proclamation of Wool's enduring status as one of the most significant painters of his generation, through his conflation of technical supremacy and conceptual vigor.

In 1981, following two decades in which non-traditional media dominated the landscape of conceptual art, Douglas Crimp published his seminal text The End of Painting, and thus postulated the impossibility of the medium’s continuation. Riled by this declaration as a provocation, Wool defiantly ended a two year hiatus and returned to painting this same year. The artist’s subsequent revolution of the genre embraced aesthetic anarchy and, as noted by Ann Goldstein, his progressive vision was rooted in a process of cleansing: “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.” (“How to Paint” in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2008, p. 185) Bearing Wool’s idiosyncratic pared-down aesthetic, the present work exemplifies the profoundly conceptual approach in which creation finds its ultimate zenith in the impassioned processes of destruction and erasure; “erasure as a picture itself.” (Christopher Wool quoted in Ibid., p. 176) 

Along with artists such as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Wool has adamantly explored a new territory for the medium that is conceptual, self-aware and pointedly referential: from his early drip paintings to his stamped and rolled paintings, to the celebrated stenciled word pictures and the signature-like sprays of his abstract monochromes. Comprising a condensation of Wool's painterly syntax, Untitled represents the culmination of the artist's ironic engagement with abstraction: "it's as if he's leeched the life out of his vibrant loops, captured them on film, then searched for a way to bring them back to life." (Eric Hall in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2008, p. 371) The artist has encompassed a plethora of recent art historical sources in his expansive technical reach, whilst ultimately insisting upon effacement through their accumulation. Quoting and requoting, citation and reproduction is paradoxically posited as a means of reduction.

With the overriding free and energetic loops, we are drawn to abstract forbears: the continuous webs of Brice Marden, the free handed scroll of Cy Twombly, the electric line of Franz Kline and back to the energetic dispersion of Jackson Pollock. Reaching even further back to the aesthetic automatism of André Masson, Wool firmly positions himself at the contemporary end of a lineage of the most significant abstract painters of the past century. Yet emanating from behind like digital interference, the structured presence of printed marks  equally call upon the bold raster paintings of Sigmar Polke and Ben-Day compositions of Roy Lichtenstein, or the iconic silkscreens of Warhol and Rauschenberg. As the ultimate collision of two seemingly irreconcilable artistic tendencies  -- Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art -- we experience a peculiar sense of disquieted erasure; the aftermath of a futile aesthetic battle.  We are left with a lyrical vision of a pure aesthetic that has overcome the limiting teleological lens of historical movements and has embraced a wholly original and liberated mode of painting.