Christopher Wool

A central tenet of Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) practice is the very process of painting itself. This has been explored and developed since his early years through reducing form and colour, as well as experimenting with different painting styles and reproduction techniques, such as silkscreen or pattern rollers, overlaying and erasing, covering or obscuring with paint, and adding layers on top. The range of techniques Wool has used over the years makes reference to the processes and gestures that have marked contemporary art history. The artist’s complex work encourages the viewer to reflect on the physical qualities of paint and various modes of reproduction, while honing an awareness of painting procedures and the essential elements of the medium: colour, form and line.

‘Christopher Wool’s paintings seem to capture visual urban experience, carved out of a moment for the duration of an artwork – an artwork that coverts the structures of experience into the structures of painting. Non-specific moments and impressions are lifted out of context and fixed into details of a painting that, unlike graffiti, conveys the speed and concentration of its origin only when it is contemplated over a measure of time in an art space. The dynamic of the picture’s conception becomes, very gradually, the dynamite of the thought it contains. Thought pictures.’

F. Meschede, ‘The Nothingness before nothing’ in Christopher Wool, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2007