“Christopher Wool was less concerned with language as a means to transcend image, or with the problematic conjunction of text and image, than with text as image. He had long been fascinated by the way words function when removed from the quiet authority of the page and exposed to the cacophony of the city, whether through the blaring incantations of billboards and commercial signage or the illicit interventions of graffiti artists. But with their velvety white grounds and stylized letters rendered in dense, sign painter’s enamel that pooled and dripped within the stencils, the word paintings have a resolute material presence that transcends the graphic.” – Katherine Brinson in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (and travelling), Christopher Wool.

“He’s a connoisseur of chaos and a cartographer of disorder” – Glenn O’Brien about Christopher Wool in “Apocalypse and Wallpaper”, Christopher Wool, Hans Werner Holzwarth, Cologne 2012.

Christopher Wool is an American contemporary artist, who has been pushing the boundaries of abstract painting for over 30 years. In his paintings he brings together figuration, abstraction and a wide array of media, including painting, drawing, silkscreen, stencils, paint rollers and industrial techniques. Wool approaches his works as open-ended experimentation sites, in which images are created before being subjected to various disruptive processes. By breaking order through repetition and layering, recurring motifs, erasures and reproduction of errors, the artist creates a tension between light and dark, depth and flatness. His famous large-scale “gray paintings” emerge from a cycle of addition and subtraction, as tangles of black lines are repeatedly wiped into fields of hazy washes. Another important body of work are his “word paintings”, in which he stencils black letters onto white canvas. Christopher Wool has exhibited at the Guggenheim (New York), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Wiener Secession (Vienna), Kunsthalle Basel and MOCA (Los Angeles) among others, and his work belongs to the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Tate London. Wool was born in Boston in 1955, and lives and works in New York City.

Christopher Wool, Portrait (yellow)