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Lot Essay
Defiantly obfuscating the distinction between figuration and abstraction, Christopher Wool's Untitled (P297) simultaneously challenges and upholds the two great traditions of painting. By the time Wool painted this work in 1999, the medium had been declared "dead" on numerous occasions, yet here Wool chooses to work with what were widely perceived to be the limitations of the medium in order to revitalize it. Choosing an enigmatic composition of part readymade design and part individual painterly flourishes, Wool uses his signature black and white alkyd house paint to envelop the entire surface of the composition. By embracing the previously rejected medium and utilizing the decorative pattern, Wool challenges the tenets of Modernist painting, many of which have transitioned from the realm of the avant-garde only to be absorbed through the process of commodification.
Wool presents a visually arresting panoply of signifiers and found decorative motifs, realized on a large-scale aluminum panel in stark black and white. The work radiates, with its layers of half-mediated, half-improvised patterning, including circles, wavy lines, hatchings and undulating lines reminiscent of a giant game of tic-tac-toe. The flat, twisting motif recalls Henri Matisse's Harmony in Red, 1908, (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) yet it also contains remnants of the drips and fractures that made Jackson Pollock's paintings so celebrated. The painting's surface reveals the energetic process of its facture, riddled with white pentimenti and the inky remnants of Wool's screening process.
By utilizing this all-over pattern, Wool plays with our dogmatic interpretation of art historical genres. Here, his composition plays upon our understanding of the many principles of both Minimalism and Pop as he draws on his earlier Minimalist "roller patterns" of floral screens but executes them using the silkscreen process made famous by Andy Warhol, but Wool goes one step further. "In Warhol's best works, the dead movie star or the electric chair seems to change, and the viewer experiences this with both relief and heightened interest, only to discover that the image is the same and there is no escaping the harsh reality, or unreality, of the single image itself. Wool is more reticent, cooler even than Warhol. Since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variegation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting. (J. Cauldwell, quoted by A. Goldstein, "What They're Not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool," in A. Goldstein (ed.), Christopher Wool, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 259).
Wool invokes--through overprinting, clogging and silkscreen slippage--a unique grittiness and intensity less prevalent in Warhol's paintings. 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, quoted in Ibid.). In Untitled, Wool also embraces pentimenti, engaging with erasure by using white semi-opaque paint. The work becomes a complex field of decorative elements partially obscured, yet rendered more intriguing. Wool draws the spectator increasingly to the possibilities of what might be represented underneath, rather than on top of, the painterly smoke screen. Untitled appears--through the myriads of patterns, lines and shapes--to have developed its own vernacular or hieroglyphic system, drawing parallels with the "Word" paintings Wool began in 1987. Both the text paintings and Untitled share an interest in layering, but for Untitled it is not a question of meaning but of process, successively building up and "unbuilding" its composition.
Painted a decade after the artist produced his iconic Apocalypse Now, this work still possesses some of the pent-up aggression seen in those early iconic paintings. Traces of Pollock-like drips can been seen scattered throughout the work as an indication of the speed and ferocity at which Wool worked. Just as the aggressive phrases of his earlier "Word" paintings seem to prevent the viewer from totally accessing the work, in Untitled (P297) Wool's all-over grid presents with a barrier not normally found in painting and symbolically denying entry into the work, reflecting perhaps both the artist's own relationship to both the medium and the art world itself.
In Untitled, Wool boldly addresses the conflicts inherent to contemporary image-making, affirming his continued belief in the medium. Through specifically engaging with the history of post-war American Art, he registers Pop Art's methods of mechanized production, Minimalism's emphatic denial of the author and painterly abstraction's privileging of form over content. In Untitled, Wools embraces all of these paradigms--uniting the abstract and figurative, painting and print, picture and process--to explore the boundaries of contemporary painting.
Wool presents a visually arresting panoply of signifiers and found decorative motifs, realized on a large-scale aluminum panel in stark black and white. The work radiates, with its layers of half-mediated, half-improvised patterning, including circles, wavy lines, hatchings and undulating lines reminiscent of a giant game of tic-tac-toe. The flat, twisting motif recalls Henri Matisse's Harmony in Red, 1908, (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) yet it also contains remnants of the drips and fractures that made Jackson Pollock's paintings so celebrated. The painting's surface reveals the energetic process of its facture, riddled with white pentimenti and the inky remnants of Wool's screening process.
By utilizing this all-over pattern, Wool plays with our dogmatic interpretation of art historical genres. Here, his composition plays upon our understanding of the many principles of both Minimalism and Pop as he draws on his earlier Minimalist "roller patterns" of floral screens but executes them using the silkscreen process made famous by Andy Warhol, but Wool goes one step further. "In Warhol's best works, the dead movie star or the electric chair seems to change, and the viewer experiences this with both relief and heightened interest, only to discover that the image is the same and there is no escaping the harsh reality, or unreality, of the single image itself. Wool is more reticent, cooler even than Warhol. Since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variegation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting. (J. Cauldwell, quoted by A. Goldstein, "What They're Not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool," in A. Goldstein (ed.), Christopher Wool, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 259).
Wool invokes--through overprinting, clogging and silkscreen slippage--a unique grittiness and intensity less prevalent in Warhol's paintings. 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, quoted in Ibid.). In Untitled, Wool also embraces pentimenti, engaging with erasure by using white semi-opaque paint. The work becomes a complex field of decorative elements partially obscured, yet rendered more intriguing. Wool draws the spectator increasingly to the possibilities of what might be represented underneath, rather than on top of, the painterly smoke screen. Untitled appears--through the myriads of patterns, lines and shapes--to have developed its own vernacular or hieroglyphic system, drawing parallels with the "Word" paintings Wool began in 1987. Both the text paintings and Untitled share an interest in layering, but for Untitled it is not a question of meaning but of process, successively building up and "unbuilding" its composition.
Painted a decade after the artist produced his iconic Apocalypse Now, this work still possesses some of the pent-up aggression seen in those early iconic paintings. Traces of Pollock-like drips can been seen scattered throughout the work as an indication of the speed and ferocity at which Wool worked. Just as the aggressive phrases of his earlier "Word" paintings seem to prevent the viewer from totally accessing the work, in Untitled (P297) Wool's all-over grid presents with a barrier not normally found in painting and symbolically denying entry into the work, reflecting perhaps both the artist's own relationship to both the medium and the art world itself.
In Untitled, Wool boldly addresses the conflicts inherent to contemporary image-making, affirming his continued belief in the medium. Through specifically engaging with the history of post-war American Art, he registers Pop Art's methods of mechanized production, Minimalism's emphatic denial of the author and painterly abstraction's privileging of form over content. In Untitled, Wools embraces all of these paradigms--uniting the abstract and figurative, painting and print, picture and process--to explore the boundaries of contemporary painting.