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Lot Essay
Composed in hypnotic layers of visceral linear gesture, Christopher Wool’s Untitled, 2006, is a mesmerising example of his later silkscreen abstractions. Executed on a large scale, the silkscreen works on paper created between 2006 and 2008 bear witness to a revolutionary method within Wool’s practice. As Julia Friedrich describes, ‘Wool has taken photos of his abstract paintings and cut out the sections that interest him the most. He then reassembles them in new ways on the computer, adding new black lines and thus creating a pseudo-painting, which is often impossible for the naked eye to divine how it was made’ (J. Friedrich, ‘The Harder You Look…’ in Christopher Wool. Porto-Köln, exh. cat., Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2009, p. 48). Rooted in the aesthetic of street graffiti that nourished much of Wool’s early output, the kinetic vibrancy of Untitled is combined here with an elegantly muted palette of black, grey, white and cream, virtuosically looped, smudged and streaked across the picture plane. Combining the lyrical hand of the artist with the boundless possibilities of digital manipulation, Untitled presents a captivating exploration of new trajectories for abstraction.
For Christopher Wool, the concept of image modification was inherently bound up with the process of silkscreening. In his silkscreen works from the 1990s, Wool uses large blowups of roller patterns, taken from his earlier engagement with wallpaper design, and layers them with white overprinting. In his later abstract paintings, to which the present work relates, Wool develops this method into a compelling additive-subtractive process, applying paint with a spray gun and erasing it with a rag and turpentine. The silkscreen works on paper represent a new level of sophistication in their use of digital enhancement, setting a new benchmark for contemporary abstraction as a multi-layered and multimedia dialogic process. ‘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’, writes Katherine Brinson. ‘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’ (K. Brinson, https://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/christopher-wool [accessed 6 January 2014]).
For Christopher Wool, the concept of image modification was inherently bound up with the process of silkscreening. In his silkscreen works from the 1990s, Wool uses large blowups of roller patterns, taken from his earlier engagement with wallpaper design, and layers them with white overprinting. In his later abstract paintings, to which the present work relates, Wool develops this method into a compelling additive-subtractive process, applying paint with a spray gun and erasing it with a rag and turpentine. The silkscreen works on paper represent a new level of sophistication in their use of digital enhancement, setting a new benchmark for contemporary abstraction as a multi-layered and multimedia dialogic process. ‘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’, writes Katherine Brinson. ‘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’ (K. Brinson, https://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/christopher-wool [accessed 6 January 2014]).