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Christopher Wool (b. 1955)

One Year no Halloween (P464), 2004
Silkscreen ink on linen, 295x198.1cm
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium US$602,500 (Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, November 8th, 2010, Lot 105)
Estimate US$400,000-600,000

“As the media of written, spoken and visual information all around us are constantly increasing, and advertising is increasingly invasive, the human being has become practically immune to this textual harassment, with the result that the impact of the mass of information that we receive is ultimately not very effective because it is quickly eliminated from the brain. That is what Wool wants to tell us with his reproductions containing erased or semi-erased messages, with striking phrases which are decontextualized and therefore lose their original meaning and initiatory power, acquiring a different, more symbolic, more subjective power. From this artistic gesture we gather that nowadays there are certain deficiencies in information processes which make communication impossible, because the verbal language used in the medias is no longer sufficient to provide a clear understanding of reality” (F. Camps Ortiz, “Meanings,” Christopher Wool, Valencia, 2006, p. 196). [...]

Provenance Luhring Augustine, New York

Untitled (P180), 1993
Enamel on aluminum, 228.6x152.4cm
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium US$1,762,500 (Sotheby's, New York, November 9th, 2010, Lot 3)
Estimate US$1,200,000-1,800,000

Hole, 1992
Enamel on aluminum, 132.1x90.8cm
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium US$1,762,500 (Christie's, New York, November 10th, 2010, Lot 3)
Estimate US$1,200,000-1,800,000

Christopher Wool's Word paintings emerged during a time bursting with a rough and seedy aesthetic, incorporating dark humor in a post-modern way, effectively becoming an emblem of a current cultural phenomenon. Wool began using words as imagery as early as 1987 after seeing a brand new white truck with the words 'SEX LUV' hand-painted across it. This was an intensely creative period for Wool when he began to focus on double meanings of words or phrases. The ultimate effect was often only achieved when Wool broke them up in the composition of his paintings (...) With the same renegade authority as the graffiti message that inspired them originally, this incitement first to read and then to run has a street power. This art is not the descendent of advertising as Pop was, but is rather the product of the disjointed writings of the urban landscape, the warnings, boasts, insults and territorial markers of graffiti. Yet they can also be seen as illustrating the limits of painting at the time, demonstrating the fallacy of language and symbolic meaning in general and in art. [...]

Christopher Wool

Museu de Serralves (Porto)
Christopher Wool

The heavy silence and emasculation that characterise the Serralves rooms has became diluted by Christopher Wool’s painting and silkscreen work. Reduced abstractions that unleash layers of sound, unheard music overcoming those sumptuous white spaces. There are street encounters along the route with particular note, beats, control, and rhythms. These paintings are translated into a withdrawal from reality and from personal interaction into desire and delusion, with a sense of fragmentation.

Through untitled silkscreen to untitled painting, an urban schizophrenia is translated into a pictorial context. The institutionalized interior space that delimits the museum from the urban area surrounding it is brought down by the inconsistent and contradictory elements demarking the 35 large-scale surfaces. As on an urban set, through streets and parks, from private places to public spaces and therein, we walk in erratic wet brush strokes and prearranged accidents, sinking in to the residual paint’s appearance and disappearance.

Painted symbols, most of them were made between 2006 and 2008 and a few conceived previously; some are manmade marks while others are more mechanical – enamel on linen or silkscreen ink on paper. Wool’s painting style depicts urban decay: he erases, replace and covers up in layers small areas on a surface with different lines, spots, stains and colours. Transforming what is generally accepted as the reality of a disciplined space into an idiosyncratic belief maintained by the work’s disorder.

A flow of strong, regular, disorderly repeated patterns of movement and arrangements, playing like notes on a white page or blank canvas. These large-scale vertical impositions become sensorial portals into different territories. Meanwhile, those discomforting deviations reverberate in individual uttered sounds experienced as recognizable, internally expressed opinions.

Moving on to a different set from the one he made with the painted phrases, his work still has a hardcore combination of defiance, intelligence and visual talent. Nevertheless, this anti-establishment is pitch-perfect for today’s market. Through these pictures Wool express something, then weaken it; he makes an argument then rejects it, while comprising the whole and then exploding the components.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 250_1 (183), Febrero_Marzo 2009 España © Christopher Wool, "Untitled", 2007, pintura sobre tela, 269,24x243,84cm.