christopher wool paintings
In a recent essay on Moriyama’s “auto-portraits,” curator Simon Baker describes those images where the photographer is rendered as a reflection caught almost by chance in a pane of glass, or as a shadow falling over an uneven surface. But we know as well what it is like to feel the power of technology over us, to submit to the Internet’s round-the-clock calls on our attention or give up our fingerprints at border control. They aren’t the outcome of expressive gestures, but neither have they emerged through the kinds of antigestures Wool has deployed in recent paintings that relate closely to the urban environment in which his work is made. It was created in collaboration with the artist Josh Smith, with who Wool has been collaborating for many years. See more ideas about artist, wool, contemporary art. The painting is a large white aluminum plate painted with black letters that, once decoded, read 'Run Dog Run Dog Run'. Each of Christopher Wool’s recent large paintings—including the eight shown at the 54th Biennale, in 2011—is dominated by a bulbous central blotch, taller than it is wide. The differing backgrounds of both artists brings out another dialogue between disciplines in Wool's work, here combining Hell's conceptual poetry and art. Since throughout the whole process there is no painting actually involved, only the digital re-working of previous works through photographs, art critic Vera Kotaji suggest that it explores the viewing of art rather than the process itself. Following the legacy previously defined by Andy Warhol, the work twists the very conception of painting as something unique and singular. Left and above: Christopher Wool at work in his East Village studio, New York. Bronze Sculpture - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, Content compiled and written by Sarah Frances Dias, Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Lewis Church. 16 May 2018 The artist usually expresses his ideas through several mediums such as paper, photography, and painting. 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. By using paint rollers or stamps that are traditionally used to give walls a 'wallpapered' appearance, Wool brings in more 'ordinary' and commonplace visual signatures into the frame of conceptual art. Christopher Woolis a contemporary American painter. Wool began studying art in high school, and when he 17 he studied painting and photography briefly at Sarah Lawrence College before enrolling at the New York Studio School in Manhattan. Since the 1980s, Wool's art has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas. This work depicts abstract shapes, spattered across the canvas. But these formal abstract 'compositions' also allude to Rorschach's inkblot psychological tests, invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921. The use of language echoes and questions the dynamics between art, significance and signifier. The images recall Rorschach tests because there are suggestions of symmetry, but one quickly realizes they aren’t symmetrical at all. Other pairs of words include: "incest and nicest", "slave and salve", "anus and stuns" and "perils and penis", all of which merge together in the same blurred manner. Wool claims that the work "starts somewhere and progresses by reacting on itself", greatly emphasising the push and pull that defines this ambiguous process. Wool’s work sets up tensions between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. This non-standard spacing and break-up of the words often make them difficult to read, whilst at other times Wool removes some or all of the vowels, transposing TRBL for 'trouble', for example. The paintings, therefore, are reminiscent not only of puddles or stains but of the stutter of a scratched CD, computer screens frozen for no apparent reason, or the glitches you get when printing out a document that has gone through the feeder of an ink-jet printer at an odd angle, all of which are amalgams of material and coded worlds. In this way, the works also appeal as a sort of 'nonsensical graphic design'. "Christopher Wool Artist Overview and Analysis". Photograph on paper - Can Your Monkey Do The Dog Collaboration with Josh Smith, Michele Didier Gallery. For their portrayal of American culture, they could be seen to echo the photographs of Robert Frank, such as The Americans (1958). by photographing small old drawings and printing them out at a hugely inflated scale, which makes their images disintegrate into halftone dots. 1955) - US-American painter, installation artist and photographer Each signed and dated 'WOOL 1997' and numbered 'AP 1/10' on verso in pencil Edition: 30 + 10 e.a. Through paint or the spraying of enamel, he adds and combines a series of original gestures, then removing parts of the painting through the use of towels soaked in turpentine. What kinds of marks are viable after gestural expressionism has been so rigorously questioned? Some of Wool's works, he adds, "are even less signifying than the words and phrases of his text paintings". We cannot fathom anything in one painting that makes it the successor or precursor to any other, or discover a fixed set of parameters that determines the variations. Each blotch is based on some original instance of analog formlessness, which is corrupted by being (mis)treated with a number of digital processes and then subjected to further analog deteriorations in the process of silk-screening. This strange perspective makes this work seem to exist in a place between abstraction and representation, a motif that underlies much of Wool's broader photographic work. Wool (who looks back to a lineage of artists who use printing against these purposes, Dieter Roth more than anyone else, but also Daido Moriyama, whose landmark 1972 book Bye Bye Photography Dear includes all kinds of degraded, fragmented, overenlarged, and scratchy images) seems committed to corroding and deteriorating his images and, more generally, debasing the very processes of image making. As suggested by this title, referencing Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), allusion to film, television and other art forms is often made through the choice of words depicted. Photograph on paper - East Broadway Breakdown. The underlying expressive gestures of black 'chaos' beneath, by being 'covered up' by white, might also be seen to establish an analogy or a metaphor with Wool's own desire to annihilate expressive gesture from painting. It is part of a larger body of work and collaboration between Wool and the author and musician Richard Hell, one of the originators of punk in New York. In this group of paintings, commonly known as his 'gray works', Wool further reworks the silkscreens in a complex creative process. Prince adds that Wool has always had the ability to "convert this formalism into a statement of loss, the loss of meaning". Art critic John Corbett also claims that the "interweavings of improvisation and composition can be seen as dual energy entities", acting each with its own strength, exerting "an influence on the methods and processes used". The work also raises the question of who is being addressed, creating a 'ricocheting' subjectivity, where the "source and iteration, interior and exterior, seems to oscillate, switch roles, project and recede like an optical illusion", as observed by art critic Achim Hochdorfer. Making a name in the New York art scene in the early 1980s, Christopher Wool is best known for his word paintings, white aluminum panels with black stenciled letters spelling out text like "Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids" (in his 1998 work Apocalypse Now). Since the 1980s, Wool's art has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas. Since his emergence and rise to prominence in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Wool has retained his status as a crucial and ethos-defining artist. Nonetheless, we can tell that during the silk-screening of these computer-transformed images, further corruptions occur: The ink could be changed from black to rusty brown, sometimes midway through printing a work, so half an image is rendered in black, the other half in rust. Value of Christopher Wool Painting Rises 350,000 Percent Eileen Kinsella , October 9, 2014 A print by Jim Kempner, on sale in the dealer's booth at the 2014 Downtown Art Fair. The subject is “given over entirely to [the] city,” Baker writes, and the “city somehow yield[s] up (or return[s]) the author from his engagement with it, picturing him as he pictures it.” Wool’s paintings likewise make us think of what it means for the subject to be given over to the city, which seems itself imprinted on the painting. So often we are told that gadgets allow us to control our world: BlackBerries and iPads supposedly enable us to buy what we like when we like, live just as we want to live. This work not only expresses issues of process, replication, and digital manipulation, but also reflects the very act of 'self-negation', improvisation and constant questioning that defines much of Wool's work. Since the test sustains that the self will classify abstract forms based on their own perceptual and psychological presets, the work can be seen to mirror this approach, by offering up the forms to different interpretations according to the viewer's own 'psychological' and imaginative whims. The Untitled picture features an empty street at night in New York. Christopher Wool may be best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he actually works in a wide range of styles and with an array of painterly techniques, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen printing. At the top right of six paintings, for instance, there are two dark amoeba-like shapes in a puddle of lighter liquid that seems to have seeped away from the center. The image is then sent back to the first artist, who can leave the work as it is, or add a third layer to the work in a similar process. Organized by the Guggenheim museum at the Art Institute of Chicago, a massive exhibition of Christopher Wool’s paintings has traveled from New York, after just having been on view, to the city that Wool considers his hometown. Each painting requires four screens to render its image, and though sometimes the resulting quadrants are correctly aligned, in two works there is a deliberate fuckup, a misalignment leaving a sliver of white at the center of the image, or a gap through which one sees an earlier, differently colored layer of printing. Wool also drops out whatever colors were in the earlier works and reduces them to gray scale. The work is a bronze sculpture, composed of a contorted wire that seems to define a random yet organic shape. In this way, the work can be seen to echo the gestural creations of the Abstract Expressionists artists, just as Hans Hofmann and Mark Rothko created works through the push and pull of overlapping layers. The composition only allows meaning to be divined on closer attention, when the letters or words are read individually or out loud. Incised rollers with enamel on aluminium - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York. In fact, much of his work is characterized by a calculated, predictable and orderly approach. Christopher Wool (born 1955) is an American artist. However, with Wool, this approach is more innovative, as it aims to capture not only the process of art as an end result, but the overlapping and juxtaposition of multiple timeframes in one single creation. He lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas, together with his wife and fellow painter Charline von Heyl. This work is part of Wool's wider 'word painting' series that began in the late 1980s and which constitute his best-known and most commercially sought-after body of work. 1955, Chicago, IL) has unceasingly explored the complexities of abstract painting, offering a continuous investigation into the medium at a time when many regarded the practice to be obsolete. Despite the variety of themes and subjects, they all seem to portray a sense of desolation, estrangement, solitude and anonymity. And however many digital screens we own, they can’t shield us from the everyday grime of urban life. One of Wool’s most celebrated text paintings from 1991, reads theshow iso / ver theaud / ienceget up / toleave the / irseats ti / metocollect / theircoats / and gohome / theyturn ar / ound nomo / recoats and / nomorehome. It is part of a larger body of work that explores random 'stains' of paint, first shown at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. He lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas, together with his wife and fellow painter Charline von Heyl. This work also seems to recapture elements of Abstract Expressionism, prompting writer Cornelius Tittel to ask whether Wool recognizes the irony that by including expressionist gestures in his work Wool continues its legacy. The lack of a perceptible chronological sequence is tied to the temporal confusion within the works—by which I mean that we have no way of knowing, just by looking at them, which parts derive from earlier drawings, and which were more recently created. Black lines are drawn over swipes and dashes of paint, and layered canvases. The improvisation brings the viewer's attention to the unexpected and the randomness of the process, while the composition acts as a 'recapturing' of that freedom. Developed throughout a year, the artist and the musician gathered once every week in a spontaneous and informal gathering, where they created variations of these word paintings. Some paintings seem printed too faintly, whereas others are overprinted so many times that their blacks appear inky and tacky. The book is composed of 160 black and white photographs, all taken at night with a 35mm camera as the artist wandered the streets between the Lower East Side and Chinatown, the neighborhood where he has lived and worked for 25 years. “The best paintings are the ones that you could not have imagined before you began…” (C. Wool quoted in H. W. Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, New York 2008, p. 266). Wool is not concerned with these apparent disparities, but suggests that he merely aims to explore painting itself in the contemporary world: either as a denial of the act of creation (through words) or by creating new dialogues derived from existing artistic contexts. From this perspective, the work takes on a satirical nature, one not only derived from the rejection of art history, but also by the fact that the very creation echoes the traditional wall patterns that adorn American households. Critic Achim Hochdorfer adds that it "appears to represent a kind of primal scene of expressionist art", greatly emphasizing the emotion and gestural content within the body of work. What makes the new works especially powerful is how different analog and digital deteriorations come to occupy the same plane. But each of these paintings is ten feet high, and it is shocking to see these nonchalant, impudent anti-forms in such monumental paintings. In fact, he began Through a process of digital imaging and the use of editing programs, the artists create artworks by "four hands". This work consists of out of focus words, layered atop each other in the center of the page. Wool layers this printing within a painting, "reinvigorating the pictorial composition". It represents the shift in Wool's paintings that occured during the early 2000s, when he began to use his own previous work as material by photographing and silkscreening to develop new works. Yet Wool also seems to take into account the ways in which we are affected by our relationships with new technologies. Wool grew up in Chicago, and relocated to New York City in the 1970s, where he enrolled in the Studio School with Abstract Expressionist painters … These paintings were first shown at the 303 Gallery in 1988, in a collaborative exhibition entitled Apocalypse Now with Robert Gober. View of “ILLUMInations,” Italian Pavilion, Venice, 2011. They might also recall the head shapes in Philip Guston’s 1965 paintings, but again Wool’s forms are too ill defined to really connect to any figurative referents. The harsh capital letters were stenciled on, following a standardized grid-like spacing system. The series joins similar words, creating dichotomies and contrasts through partial homonyms and contrasts. It is hard to know, though, just looking at the paintings, what the sequence of these moves has been, or which have repeated—and indeed, our inability to trace the steps of their creation is part of their charge. Christopher Wool’s work emerged in the 1980s when neo-expressionist painting had achieved ascendancy not only in New York but also in Germany and Italy. By rejecting color and composition, it makes an attempt to define a new type of painting, devoid of all the traditions of the past. But above all, it is the works’ size that destroys our ability to understand them as a series. This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. Each of Christopher Wool’s recent large paintings—including the eight shown at the 54th Biennale, in 2011—is dominated by a bulbous central blotch, taller than it is wide. In this perspective, they reference the inner world of the observer. Wool, however, deploys size as a kind of weapon against those kinds of looking that would attempt to tame his paintings. The work is a photograph that depicts part of an abstract painting. Critic Ken Johnson emphasizes another aspect when he explains that by showing the least "attractive things imaginable", Wool finds "his own kind of grungy beauty". Each central blotch is an outsize monument to the material residue of the density of urban life as well as witness to a morcellated subjectivity assailed by the technologies that cut it down the middle or split it apart. Yet it feels wrong to call these looming blotches “shapes”: They have very few of the characteristics that we understand as constituting shape, since the contours, sometimes defined, elsewhere disintegrate and become patchy, and each nonshape partially continues in a faint area to one side. Just as the blunt rows of stenciled letters in that piece staged a kind of protest against the 1980s obsession with property and entertainment, the defiant size and purposeful inscrutability of the new works make manifest a comparable opposition—one that militates against and ultimately refuses the ceding of the subject to the city and to technology. It is the unique collaborative process, one that promotes a 'silent' artistic dialogue, that heightens the significance of this work. ©2021 The Art Story Foundation. This work was included in Wool's East Broadway Breakdown (2004) book, a project began in mid-1990s, and finally completed in 2002. 6 heliogravures on wove paper 'Zerkall' USA, 1997 Christopher Wool (b. If the traditional Abstract Expressionist painting was witness to its maker’s subjectivity, evidence of his feelings, his angst, his bravado (here I sketch a cliché)—and if succeeding generations found ways to make antisubjective abstract paintings (whether by transferring found shapes or ceding compositional decisions to preset serial systems or using chance procedures)—then how could we describe the approach to subjectivity in Wool’s works? 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. In one painting, Wool double-prints the image slightly off register. In Wool’s new works, something of this double bind is materialized: Painterly gesture is partly ceded to the computer, and its programs are used as modes of distortion; but digital technologies also work alongside older material processes of corruption, with final say given to the messy analog machine of the silk-screen press.