克里斯托弗·塢爾

Luhring Augustine & Hodes Gallery, New York
Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
Ed Cauduro, Portland (acquired from the above in January 1989)
Sotheby's, New York, May 9, 2012, Lot 15
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, The Ed Cauduro Collection, September 2004 - January 2005
Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, Inaugural Exhibition of the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary, October 2005
Brussels, Charles Riva Collection, Made in New York, April - July 2014

This painting is in very good condition. There are a few scattered fly specks along the bottom edge, located in the second design element from the right corner and along the lower left edge. There are two very soft linear abrasions located: 12 ¾ - 21 ¾ in. from the left edge and 3 ½ - 5 ½ in. from the bottom edge; 23 ½ - 24 ½ in. from the left edge and 4- 4 ¼ in. from the bottom. Under UV light, there are no apparent restorations. This work is not framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Teeming with the ineluctable urban cool of downtown New York City in the 1980s, Christopher Wool’s monumental Untitled of 1988 is a superbly realized and truly paradigmatic example of his groundbreaking abstract vernacular. In every way exemplary of Wool’s specialized approach to painting, Untitled presents the viewer with an aesthetically engaging and intellectually rigorous artistic experience.  While many formal comparisons with his legendary predecessors have informed contemporaneous analysis of Wool’s place within the pantheon of twentieth-century art history, and while Wool himself has consistently sustained a deliberately pragmatic association with the innovators of past generations, ultimately the process-driven and singularly conceptual artistic plane Wool reached in the execution of works such as Untitled constitutes a new frontier of art-making that is inseparable from its precise historical context and immediate circumstances. As summarized by Katrina Brown, “With their grand scale, bold unapologetic presence and their stark black and white confidence, Wool's paintings seem like an indescribable urban cool, a tense fusion of intellect and emotion, control and chaos." (Katrina M. Brown, Contemporary Magazine, Winter 2003, cited in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, New York 2008, p. 296)

After spending his formative adolescence in the Southside of Chicago in the 1960s, and his young adulthood embroiled in the 1970s avant-garde arts scene in lower Manhattan, Wool arrived at his mature practice in 1981. It was a moment of conceptual discord, aesthetic turmoil, and pervasive identity crises for the arts: the triumphant rebirth of painterly process in the shape of the Neo-Expressionist movement was being challenged, immediately and aggressively, by an equally powerful critical backlash to the genre and definitive declaration of “The End of Painting,” codified by the art historian and champion of postmodernism Douglas Crimp. In the midst of this tumult, Wool initiated a singular investigation and scrutiny of the role of painting from within the medium itself through the creation of a body of works that are inherently self-reflexive and deeply aware of art historical convention. With his stylistic interests invested exclusively in abstraction, Wool began to navigate a solitary course through the complex landscape of contemporary arts discourse; as Katherine Brinson describes: “Excruciatingly aware of the taboo status of gestural mark-making as an index of self-expression, Wool was nonetheless compelled to explore whatever space was left within abstraction for a critical practice.” (Katherine Brinson, “Trouble is My Business,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (and travelling), Christopher Wool, 2013, p. 37)

Untitled maintains a forcefully discursive relationship with art history whilst being, in its very essence, deeply informed by and utterly inseparable from the unapologetically raw and urban circumstances of its creation. The seeds of Wool’s aesthetic breakthrough, achieved in earnest in 1986-87, were sewn in the strictly metropolitan vernacular of his surroundings. As he travelled around his downtown milieu, Wool observed workmen decorating the hallways of tenement buildings using a paint roller incised with designs that included blossoms, leaves, and vines as well as abstract geometries. It was a common trick used by landlords to save money: once applied to the wall, these rolled-on shapes resembled wallpaper in their decorative nature and regularity. Wool recalls being impressed by the challenge implicit in making the rolled-on patterns line up successfully along the length of the wall; this discovery sparked a critical turning point in his artistic development, for in the pre-styled roller Wool found a formal repertoire that perfectly straddled the poles of figuration and abstraction whilst retaining an uncompromising non-expressive cool.

After mastering the creative potential of the rollers, Wool rapidly expanded his process to incorporate the use of rubber stamps. Untitled, executed at this very moment of procedural development, is among the earliest stamped works, each of which bears the same repeated curlicue mark in jet black alkyd across its glowing white flashe-primed aluminum face. Wool manufactured his stamps in deliberately large rectangular units so that traces of his black alkyd would remain along their edges, inevitably inserting its disruptive presence surreptitiously amongst the otherwise perfectly regular formation of interlocking decorative impressions. Untitled is defined by this schema of painterly ‘glitches’ that foil the sterility of its otherwise industrial-seeming compositional perfection. The effect is one in which Wool invokes the associative potential of decorative imagery for his scrutiny of contemporary painting; as presciently observed by Gary Indiana for the Village Voice in 1987: “Their decorative qualities are deceptions. The eye doesn’t linger in one place or rove over them registering choice bits, but locks into contact with the surface and freezes …They exercise an almost hideous power, like real mirrors of existence.” (Gary Indiana, The Village Voice, March 1987, cited in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Op. Cit., p. 48) Hypnotic and affecting though it may be in the rhythmic repetition of its layered organization and subtle hints at painterly volition, Untitled nevertheless perseveres in its measured aloofness, confronting us not as a series of individually expressive marks such as in the similarly all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock but ultimately as a powerfully concise and consummate declaration of the state of painting in the postmodern era.