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拍品专文
Incorporating the artist's earlier preoccupation with allover pattern, Christopher Wool's Untitled is a mesmerising matrix of intertwining cerise leaves. Extending the breadth of his technique, in 1988 Wool introduced the rubber stamp into his repertoire. This new method permitted Wool to broaden the limited spectrum of 'off-the-shelf' imagery of the rollers, engaging with a more complex pictorial scheme including bouquets of flowers, his iconic running men and birds. Executed in 1989, Untitled lyrically explores the potential of this new technique: 'interlocking' individual stamped images sprawled across the chalky white surface in an allover manner, albeit still maintaining a distinct figure/ground relationship between the uninflected, monochrome surface of the alkyd on aluminum ground and the luminous, red acrylic paint applied to it. Via processes of layering, overprinting and slippage, the decorative designs are intentionally rendered flawed, and therefore vulnerable. As John Caldwell has suggested: 'In many works the image is so faint at times that it almost fades away entirely. In fact, the eye does move across the paintings' surface repeatedly because in ordinary life, outside of painting, variation implies change or development, and the viewer actually tries to read the imperfections of the process for meaning'(J. Caldwell, quoted in A. Goldstein, 'What they're not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool' in A. Goldstein (ed.), Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Eli Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 259).
Historically reflexive yet very much of its own time, Wool's oeuvre interestingly draws inspiration from both the inside and outside of art, working within an underlying trajectory that contemplates the conventions and problematics of the practice of painting in the 1980s and 90s. Through his mechanical creative process, Wool invokes the multiple legacies of American Post-War painterly abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism, consciously addressing the challenges that face contemporary image making. As Bruce W. Ferguson has observed, 'Wool accepts that he is and that his paintings are, at any moment, within what Richard Prince calls 'wild history,' subject to the intertextual meeting of various discourses' (B. Ferguson, quoted in A. Goldstein, 'What they're not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool' in A. Goldstein (ed.), Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Eli Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 256)
Historically reflexive yet very much of its own time, Wool's oeuvre interestingly draws inspiration from both the inside and outside of art, working within an underlying trajectory that contemplates the conventions and problematics of the practice of painting in the 1980s and 90s. Through his mechanical creative process, Wool invokes the multiple legacies of American Post-War painterly abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism, consciously addressing the challenges that face contemporary image making. As Bruce W. Ferguson has observed, 'Wool accepts that he is and that his paintings are, at any moment, within what Richard Prince calls 'wild history,' subject to the intertextual meeting of various discourses' (B. Ferguson, quoted in A. Goldstein, 'What they're not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool' in A. Goldstein (ed.), Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Eli Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 256)