CHRISTOPHER WOOL AT SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM NEW YORK
October 25, 2013–January 22, 2014
CHRISTOPHER
WOOL AT SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM NEW YORK
October 25, 2013–January 22, 2014
Since his emergence as an artist in the 1980s, Christopher Wool has
forged an agile, highly focused practice that ranges across processes and
mediums, paying special attention to the complexities of painting. Filling the
museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and an adjacent gallery, the
exhibitionChristopher
Wool explores the artist’s nuanced engagement with the
question of how to make a picture.
Wool was born in 1955 and grew up in Chicago. By the early 1970s he
had settled in New York City, where the anarchic, interdisciplinary energy of
the punk and No wave scenes were a pivotal influence on his creative
development. In the subsequent decade, he set out to explore the possibilities
of painting at a time when many considered the medium outmoded and irrelevant
to avant-garde practice. He made a defining breakthrough between 1986 and ’87
when he began to use paint rollers incised with floral and geometric designs to
transfer patterns in severe black enamel to a white ground. Collapsing any
distinction between the physical process of making the work and its visual
content, these everyday tools provided the artist with a repertoire of
ready-made imagery that avoided both spontaneous gesture and self-conscious
compositional decisions. Instead, Wool focused on the small failures that
occurred within this mechanized framework, allowing breakdowns and slippages in
the patterns to accrue a delicate emotional resonance.
In tandem with his pattern paintings, Wool developed a body of work
that similarly subverted a set of existing forms, this time using language as
his appropriated subject matter. Rendering a word or phrase in bold, blocky
stencils arrayed across a geometric grid, he preserved the specific form and
order of the language, but freely stripped out punctuation, disrupted
conventional spacing, and removed letters. The resulting compositions oscillate
between verbal communication and pure formalism, with their structural
dissonance reflecting the state of anxiety and agitation conjured by the texts
themselves.
The silkscreen has been a primary tool for Wool since the 1990s. In
his earliest screenprinted paintings, he expanded on the vocabulary of the
pattern works, enlarging their stylized floral motifs for use as near-abstract
units of composition. In this period, Wool frequently sabotaged his existing
forms as a way to covertly generate new ones, layering the flower icons in
dense, overlapping configurations that congeal into a single black mass or
become obscured with passages of brusque overpainting. He also introduced a
new, entirely freehand gesture in the form of a looping line applied with a
spray gun—an irreverent interruption of the imagery below that evokes an act of
vandalism on a city street.
Wool’s attraction to the bleak poetics of the urban margins was
amplified in his first major photography series Absent Without Leave (1993). Taken during a period of
solitary travels in Europe and elsewhere, the images are saturated with an
atmosphere of alienation and shot in a raw, abrasive style that disregards any
concern for technical refinement. A similar spirit of disaffection pervades a
parallel body of photographic work titled East Broadway
Breakdown (1994–95/2002), but in this series Wool focused on a
more familiar topography, documenting his nightly walk home from his East
Village studio. Highlighting the city’s unadorned, off-hours existence, the
photographs depict a nocturnal landscape emptied of citizens and stripped down
to a skeleton of street lamps, chain-link fences, blemished sidewalks, and parked
cars.
A critical conceptual shift occurred in Wool’s practice in the late
1990s when he began to use his previous creative output as the material for
new, autonomous works. Wool would take a photograph of a finished picture,
transpose it to a silkscreen, and then reassign it wholesale to a fresh canvas.
At times these acts of self-appropriation leave the original image untouched,
although uncannily transformed by the process of mechanical reproduction. In
other examples, Wool manually reworked his screenprinted doubles, adding
rollered paint or sprayed enamel to create disorienting hybrids that entwine
recycled and original gestures.
Over the past decade, Wool’s simultaneous embrace and repression of
painting’s expressive potential have culminated in an open-ended vein of works
that he refers to as his “gray paintings.” In these large-scale abstractions,
Wool alternates between the act of erasing and the act of drawing, repeatedly
wiping away sprayed black enamel paint to create layers of tangled lines and
hazy washes. The artist describes the cycle of composition and loss inherent to
this process as an attempt to harness the condition of doubt into a generative
creative force. The same challenge to the authority of the unique, original
gesture is extended in Wool’s most recent silkscreened canvases, which use
digital processing to warp the scale, color, and resolution of his painted
marks, often merging them with details from other paintings. A single work
might unify the traces of multiple past moments of creation, as images return
in new guises to be considered afresh within Wool’s evolving pictorial
investigations.
KATHERINE BRINSON – ASSOCIATE CURATOR
Christopher Wool is generously supported by Guggenheim Partners, LLC.
Major support is provided by the Leadership Committee for the
exhibition: Luhring Augustine, New York; The Brant Foundation, Inc.; Thompson
Dean Family Foundation; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Gagosian Gallery;
Danielle and David Ganek; Brett and Dan Sundheim; and Zadig & Voltaire. Additional
Leadership Committee gifts are provided by The Broad Art Foundation, Santa
Monica; Marguerite Steed Hoffman; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; Galerie Max
Hetzler, Berlin; Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill; Agnes and Edward Lee; Nina and
Frank Moore; Nancy and Woody Ostrow; Elham and Tony Salame; Cynthia and Abe
Steinberger; Jennifer and David Stockman; Christen Sveaas; and David Teiger.
This exhibition is also supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts, with additional funding provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman
Simonds Foundation.
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CHRISTOPHER WOOL
Christopher
Wool was born in 1955 grew up in Chicago. In 1972, he enrolled at Sarah
Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where he studied painting with
Richard Pousette-Dart. He left for Manhattan after a year and attended classes
at the New York Studio School. Wool soon became immersed in the underground
film and music scenes of downtown New York, taking a short hiatus from painting
to study film at New York University in the late 1970s. A couple of years later
he returned to painting while working as a studio assistant to the sculptor
Joel Shapiro, this time fully devoting himself to the medium.
In 1984 and
1986, Wool received his first solo exhibitions at New York’s Cable Gallery. An
institutional presentation of Wool’s work was held at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art in 1989 and since then his work has been exhibited widely at
institutions around the world, including Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and Kunsthalle Bern (1991); Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
(1998–99), and Kunsthalle Basel (1999); Institut Valencià d’Art Modern and
Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (2006); Museu de Arte
Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2008–09), and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2009);
and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012). Wool has also participated
in the Whitney Biennial, New York (1989), Documenta, Kassel (1992), the Lyon
Biennial (2003), and the Venice Biennale (2011). He has been named a Fellow of
the American Academy in Rome, served as a DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence, and
received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize Cologne.
Wool
currently lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas.
