Christopher Wool

The core element of Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) work is the process of painting itself, which he explores since his early years by reducing form and colour, experimenting with different painting and more specifically on reproduction techniques: using silkscreen or pattern rollers, layering and erasing, covering certain motives with paint, then adding other layers on top. The range of techniques Wool has used over the years makes reference to processes and gestures that have marked contemporary art history. His complex work encourages the viewer to reflect on the physical qualities of paint, reproduction and to be aware of painting procedures and the essential elements of the medium: form, line and colour.

‘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