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Lot Essay
'You take color out, you take gesture out - and then later you can put them in', Wool explains, 'But it's easier to define things by what they're not than by what they are'
(C. Wool, quoted in J. Caldwell, 'New Work: Christopher Wool', Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, unpaged).
Executed in 1998, Untitled is one of Christopher Wool's visually arresting allover compositions. Wool offers a panoply of inky black dots and circles across the vertiginous length this large-scale work. In parts, there are faint echoes where the paint has registered twice, engendering the surface with an intriguing depth. The work was created the same year as the artist's first major survey in the United States held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which later traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. This October, Wool will be the focus of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Wool's output is equally defined by what is present as what is absent. 'You take color out, you take gesture out - and then later you can put them in', Wool explains, 'but it's easier to define things by what they're not than by what they are' (C. Wool, quoted in J. Caldwell, 'New Work: Christopher Wool', Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, unpaged). Untitled is indicative of a larger shift that occurred in Wool's practice in the 1990s which investigated erasure or even destruction as a method of image production. In Untitled, Wool has chosen not to extend his dot pattern to the edges of the canvas and has allowed a faint gap between the continuation of the four screens used to present itself, splitting the canvas into four sections like panes of a window. As Ann Goldstein has described, the rectilinear traces of the silkscreen frames act 'like a disembodied picture of a picture, they frame a painting within a painting' (A. Goldstein, Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 262).
The origin of this dot motif, which became part of his image repertoire in the late 1980s, can be seen in Wool's first use of rollers in 1986 and his subsequent use of stamps and stencils through the late 1980s and early 1990s, broadening his imagery from the ready-made. From 1992, Wool retired his use of rollers and rubber stamps but continued to employ their specific effects through screen-printing. Untitled synthesises these multiple image-making processes and uses the dot pattern in order to open the work to a multitude of art historical and production associations. In its allusion to the Benday dot used in printing reproduction, Wool undermines this mechanized technique by allowing a host of skips, drips and overlays to proliferate across the canvas. Indeed the circles and dots recall the effervescent bubbles found in Roy Lichtenstein's Alka Seltzer, 1966. Here Wool is specifically engaging with the history of Post-War American Art, registering Pop Art's methods of mechanized production and Minimalism's emphatic denial of the author and painterly abstraction's privileging of form over content. Indeed the large-scale circles that proliferate across the surface of the work recall Jackson Pollock's paint splatters despite Wool's deployment of a radically different technique. In Untitled, Wool embraces all of these paradigms - uniting the abstract and figurative, painting and print, picture and process - to explore the boundaries of contemporary painting.
(C. Wool, quoted in J. Caldwell, 'New Work: Christopher Wool', Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, unpaged).
Executed in 1998, Untitled is one of Christopher Wool's visually arresting allover compositions. Wool offers a panoply of inky black dots and circles across the vertiginous length this large-scale work. In parts, there are faint echoes where the paint has registered twice, engendering the surface with an intriguing depth. The work was created the same year as the artist's first major survey in the United States held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which later traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. This October, Wool will be the focus of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Wool's output is equally defined by what is present as what is absent. 'You take color out, you take gesture out - and then later you can put them in', Wool explains, 'but it's easier to define things by what they're not than by what they are' (C. Wool, quoted in J. Caldwell, 'New Work: Christopher Wool', Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, unpaged). Untitled is indicative of a larger shift that occurred in Wool's practice in the 1990s which investigated erasure or even destruction as a method of image production. In Untitled, Wool has chosen not to extend his dot pattern to the edges of the canvas and has allowed a faint gap between the continuation of the four screens used to present itself, splitting the canvas into four sections like panes of a window. As Ann Goldstein has described, the rectilinear traces of the silkscreen frames act 'like a disembodied picture of a picture, they frame a painting within a painting' (A. Goldstein, Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 262).
The origin of this dot motif, which became part of his image repertoire in the late 1980s, can be seen in Wool's first use of rollers in 1986 and his subsequent use of stamps and stencils through the late 1980s and early 1990s, broadening his imagery from the ready-made. From 1992, Wool retired his use of rollers and rubber stamps but continued to employ their specific effects through screen-printing. Untitled synthesises these multiple image-making processes and uses the dot pattern in order to open the work to a multitude of art historical and production associations. In its allusion to the Benday dot used in printing reproduction, Wool undermines this mechanized technique by allowing a host of skips, drips and overlays to proliferate across the canvas. Indeed the circles and dots recall the effervescent bubbles found in Roy Lichtenstein's Alka Seltzer, 1966. Here Wool is specifically engaging with the history of Post-War American Art, registering Pop Art's methods of mechanized production and Minimalism's emphatic denial of the author and painterly abstraction's privileging of form over content. Indeed the large-scale circles that proliferate across the surface of the work recall Jackson Pollock's paint splatters despite Wool's deployment of a radically different technique. In Untitled, Wool embraces all of these paradigms - uniting the abstract and figurative, painting and print, picture and process - to explore the boundaries of contemporary painting.