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Lot Essay
Christopher Wool creates a dialogue between the abstract and symbolic in his distortion of his beginning image. Untitled (S171) is demonstrative of Wool's ability to vacillate between figural symbols and abstraction. Wool is influenced by both the Abstract Expressionist movement in his gesture and the Minimalism movement in his restricted muted palate. Created by layering different types of imagery and image-making techniques, Wool's complex compositions simultaneously reveal their construction and deconstruction registering the process of their creation in the work's final form.
In Untitled (S171) Wool first draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent creating a radically different picture in which black graphic symbols fight for attention against smeared surface. This new form of image crafting creates through a process of erasure or removal. However, Wool's erasures are all about painting, and hence, distinct from Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953, a provocation that challenged the traditional authority of the genius artist and autonomy of the artwork. In Untitled (S171) the processes of painting are expanded to include both additive and subtractive mark-making to create a complex layer of meaning and image. Indeed as the artist once professed, 'I became more interested in how to paint it than what to paint'' (C. Wool, interview with A. Goldstein, 'What they're not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool', ed. A. Goldstein Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1998,p. 258).
In Untitled (S171) Wool first draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent creating a radically different picture in which black graphic symbols fight for attention against smeared surface. This new form of image crafting creates through a process of erasure or removal. However, Wool's erasures are all about painting, and hence, distinct from Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953, a provocation that challenged the traditional authority of the genius artist and autonomy of the artwork. In Untitled (S171) the processes of painting are expanded to include both additive and subtractive mark-making to create a complex layer of meaning and image. Indeed as the artist once professed, 'I became more interested in how to paint it than what to paint'' (C. Wool, interview with A. Goldstein, 'What they're not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool', ed. A. Goldstein Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1998,p. 258).