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Lot Essay
Towering almost two and a half metres in height, the present work is a monumental example of Christopher Wool’s abstract silkscreen paintings. As if fired from a gun, splashes, drips and smears of colour are layered in a kaleidoscopic web of dots, the ghostly trace of the silkscreen frame creating a hypnotic lattice of geometric forms. Executed in 2006, the work stems from one of Wool’s most exciting periods, during which he began to develop his early silkscreen practice into a complex system of image manipulation. Using photographs of his own paintings, which he transformed, spliced and recombined using computer software before transferring the results to canvas, the artist created a thrilling blend of real and simulated gesture. The present work conjures everything from ancient ink-blotted manuscripts to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and the weathered residue of urban graffiti. Centuries of image-making linger in its inscrutable depths, asking where the boundaries of painting begin and end in the digital era.
Working in the legacy of Andy Warhol, who used the silkscreen to blur the boundaries between high art and mass-produced imagery, Wool began to explore the medium during the 1990s. Following on from his ‘word’ paintings of the previous decade, which saw him turn fragments of text into giant, near-abstract monoliths, he began to use industrial patterned paint rollers, creating vast tapestries of flowers, vines and other ornamental wallpaper-like motifs. His earliest silkscreen paintings initially extended this vocabulary; by the late 1990s, however, he had found a new subject. Wool’s own back catalogue of paintings quickly became his primary muse, with forms, textures, patterns and brushstrokes plucked from their depths and wrangled into new creations. Divided, repeated, cropped and overwritten, the trace of the artist’s hand was placed at a further layer of remove, sealed forever behind the mesh of the silkscreen. Just as Wool’s word paintings had asked whether we can still divine meaning from reconfigured text, works such as the present asked at what stage a painterly gesture loses its integrity—or, indeed, takes on a new meaning.
Over the course of history, art has repeatedly looked itself in the eye: from Rembrandt’s self-portraits at the easel, to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, to Sigmar Polke’s ‘rasterbilder’ and Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes. All sought to catch the moment at which the creative act takes flight, asking what it means to make something in our own image. Wool’s silkscreen paintings are situated firmly within this trajectory: their fluid expressive gestures, redolent of Abstract Expressionism, Neo Expressionism and street art, are put under the microscope for examination, their DNA sequenced and dissected. Other artists at the turn of the millennium would similarly make use of technological aids in this manner: from Albert Oehlen, whose computer paintings offered parodies of gestural abstraction, to Wade Guyton, who proposed that an Epson inkjet printer possessed the same amount of creative potential as a paintbrush. For Wool, however, works such as the present are less conceptual jibes than beacons of hope for the future: if painting can generate new forms from within, he proposes, its scope is unlimited.
Working in the legacy of Andy Warhol, who used the silkscreen to blur the boundaries between high art and mass-produced imagery, Wool began to explore the medium during the 1990s. Following on from his ‘word’ paintings of the previous decade, which saw him turn fragments of text into giant, near-abstract monoliths, he began to use industrial patterned paint rollers, creating vast tapestries of flowers, vines and other ornamental wallpaper-like motifs. His earliest silkscreen paintings initially extended this vocabulary; by the late 1990s, however, he had found a new subject. Wool’s own back catalogue of paintings quickly became his primary muse, with forms, textures, patterns and brushstrokes plucked from their depths and wrangled into new creations. Divided, repeated, cropped and overwritten, the trace of the artist’s hand was placed at a further layer of remove, sealed forever behind the mesh of the silkscreen. Just as Wool’s word paintings had asked whether we can still divine meaning from reconfigured text, works such as the present asked at what stage a painterly gesture loses its integrity—or, indeed, takes on a new meaning.
Over the course of history, art has repeatedly looked itself in the eye: from Rembrandt’s self-portraits at the easel, to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, to Sigmar Polke’s ‘rasterbilder’ and Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes. All sought to catch the moment at which the creative act takes flight, asking what it means to make something in our own image. Wool’s silkscreen paintings are situated firmly within this trajectory: their fluid expressive gestures, redolent of Abstract Expressionism, Neo Expressionism and street art, are put under the microscope for examination, their DNA sequenced and dissected. Other artists at the turn of the millennium would similarly make use of technological aids in this manner: from Albert Oehlen, whose computer paintings offered parodies of gestural abstraction, to Wade Guyton, who proposed that an Epson inkjet printer possessed the same amount of creative potential as a paintbrush. For Wool, however, works such as the present are less conceptual jibes than beacons of hope for the future: if painting can generate new forms from within, he proposes, its scope is unlimited.