Christopher Wool (born 1955, Chicago) is one of the most influential contemporary artists working in abstraction, internationally recognized for his paintings and signed limited edition prints. His artworks are defined by processes of layering, erasure, and repetition, often combining stenciled text, abstract patterns, and gestural marks to interrogate authorship, originality, and the instability of meaning. Iconic text-based compositions, rendered in stark black-and-white palettes, challenge the visual and linguistic conventions of painting.
Based in New York since the early 1980s, Wool draws heavily on the city's urban textures and industrial visual language, frequently employing materials and techniques that blur the boundaries between painting and printmaking. His fine art prints extend this inquiry, using silkscreen, overpainting, and mechanical reproduction to question distinctions between original artworks and editions. Christopher Wool's artworks and prints are held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and Tate, and continue to shape contemporary discourse around abstraction and image-making.
“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.
