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Lot Essay
Christopher Wool’s Untitled is an exceedingly rare multi-colored example from the artist’s iconic series of word paintings. While most are rendered in thick black text stenciled on a white aluminum ground, this polychromed panel lays bare the artist’s interest in the perception of both painting and textual information in reaction to daily life and the urban environment. Jeff Koons addressed the complexity of his fellow conceptual artist’s oeuvre, noting, “Wool’s work contains continual internal/external debate within itself. At one moment his work will display self-denial, at the next moment solipsism. Shifting psychological states, false fronts, shadows of themselves, justify their own existence…. Wool’s work locks itself in only to deftly escape through sleight of hand. The necessity to survive the moment at all costs, using its repertoire of false fronts and psychological stances is the work’s lifeblood” (J. Koons, cited in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim (and travelling), 2013, p. 35). Untitled peels away the hard layers of the city to reveal the artist’s hand. Viewed from afar, it retains the shocking immediacy the monochrome word paintings, its slogan cut and rearranged by the artist into a sort of visual poetry. However, upon closer inspection, the subtleties of the painter’s process make themselves known. By allowing for this duality, Wool asks us to reconsider our relationship with text and its link to information while also commenting on the nature of symbols, language, and the art of painting.
Acquired by the present owner just a year after it was painted, Untitled has an especially active surface, a fact that is only further emphasized by Wool’s use of colored paint to render each block letter. Using the whole spectrum, he spells out the phrase “FUCKEM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE”, omitting punctuation and ignoring proper spacing as he does in the rest of the series. The use of color here gives a deeper insight into Wool’s seemingly straightforward process. In the black works, one could be excused for thinking each stenciled glyph was applied in order until the phrase of completed. However, in this particular example, one is rewarded for looking closer. Under higher scrutiny, it becomes clear that Wool painted the letters in one color before returning to overpaint in a different shade. The dripping, pulsating pigment on the surface hides this initial coat in some cases, but in others, like the first ‘K’ and the ‘F’ of the word ‘IF’, the base layer pushes through. In the first ‘C’, a halo of red glows beneath the verdant green, and in the ‘T’ below a yellow aura radiates on the edge of midnight blue. It oozes at the periphery of the otherwise clean and orderly shapes and, juxtaposed with the vertical drips of paint, helps to create a visually dynamic composition that oscillates between being readable as text or image. Furthermore, the grain of the coarse brush is visible in each stroke as light catches darker undercoating peering through thin coverage areas. By creating this visual intrigue, Wool successfully disconnects our normal habit of reading letters for information and instead allows us to explore the pictorial qualities presented.
The word paintings are inextricably linked to the buzzing energy of the urban space, specifically New York City. Pulling inspiration from a variety of sources, Wool transmutes words and found phrases into blaring aphorisms. By doing so, he separates the letters and sentences from their origins in an attempt to investigate language itself and its place in our daily lives. “He has long been fascinated by the way words function when removed from the quiet authority of the page and exposed to the cacophony of the city, whether through the blaring incantations of billboards and commercial signage or the illicit interventions of graffiti artists,” noted Katherine Brinson on the occasion of Wool’s 2013 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, “But with their velvety white grounds and stylized letters rendered in dense, sign painter’s enamel that pooled and dripped within the stencils, the word paintings have a resolute material presence that transcends the graphic.” (K. Brinson, Ibid., p. 40). Embracing the bold style of tags and street art, Wool creates an amalgam that pulls the audience in immediately.
Basquiat loved the ‘do-it-yourself’ bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with the fringe New York, the no man’s land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world, Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions.(G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, pp. 10-11).
Basquiat loved the ‘do-it-yourself’ bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with the fringe New York, the no man’s land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world, Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions.(G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, pp. 10-11).Wool studied painting for a brief period at the New York Studio School before dropping out to explore the thriving music and underground film scene happening in the late 1970s and 80s. This segue would prove revelatory for his art practice later on as he re-emerged as a painter of abstractions that took ideas of aesthetics and ornament to task. Channeling the nonstop energy of the East Village and similar cultural neighborhoods during that period, he looked to the same urban markers of culture and creative progress as his peers like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Glenn O’Brien remarked about this connection, noting, “Basquiat loved the ‘do-it-yourself’ bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with the fringe New York, the no man’s land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world, Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions” (G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, pp. 10-11). Especially interested in the role of graffiti, stencils, and reproducible imagery, Wool’s practice hovered between expressive experimentation and Pop. When these two elements met in his studio, he successfully pulled the outside chaos of the city into his work and transfigured base elements into talismans of the era.
The word painting series had its origins on the streets of Manhattan. While walking in his Lower East Side neighborhood in the late 1980s, Wool happened upon a brand new truck covered in the simplest of graffiti. On the white metal of the vehicle, someone had spray-painted the words ‘SEX LUV’ in stenciled letters. The immediacy of the fresh paint on the pristine metal captivated the artist and he recalls returning to his studio immediately to create a work using the same tactics. This first iteration spawned numerous variants in black and white until 1993 when the current example was realized in vivid color. The words and letters that Wool uses in these paintings function more as a tool for exploration rather than simple information providers.
Though his text-based innovations were the artist’s breakthrough series, they fit cohesively into a larger investigation that has spanned the entirety of Wool’s career. In the late 1980s, around the time that he began the word paintings, the painter noticed a worker using a specialized roller made for painting repeating patterns on walls as a cheaper alternative to wallpaper. Fascinated by this process, Wool began a series that employed a similar device but swapped in black enamel to more fully emphasize the graphic qualities of the design when applied to a panel of white-painted aluminum. In conversation with the word paintings, these roller paintings engage in a similar mode of inquiry that takes into consideration found forms and self-imposed limitations inherent to the method of production. Stencils, the rollers, and later works that leverage silkscreening all point to Wool’s ability to make work that juxtaposes evidence of the working process with the dynamism of the end result. Ann Goldstein, writing about this fact for a retrospective of Wool’s work, noted, “Through process, technique, scale, composition, and imagery, Wool’s work accentuates the tensions and contradictions between the act of painting, the construction of a picture, its physical attributes, the visual experience of looking at it, and the possibilities of playing with and pushing open the thresholds of its meanings. They are defined by what they’re not – and what they hold back” (A. Goldstein, cited in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Los Angeles, The Museum Of Contemporary Art (And Travelling), 1998, P. 263). By emphasizing process and highlighting ‘mistakes’ like drips and uneven application, Wool addresses painting itself through a conceptual lens.
At their core, Wool’s word paintings are an exceptionally nuanced conversation about text and image relationships, semiotics, and the ways in which we absorb and deliver information in a language-based society. Using letters and words as his subject, the meaning one extracts from the artist’s wry phrases are only the beginning of a true understanding of pieces like Untitled. Indeed, the present example makes this more clear than any of its brethren, making it a particularly important member of the group. By fixating on color and the overlap of paint in conjunction with the words themselves, Wool sets up an internal dialogue about ways of looking. In a conversation about this subject with Martin Prinzhorn, the artist admits, “I always considered myself involved with painting. I can’t imagine someone seeing one of those and not realizing it’s a painting. I think, the way I used text was not didactic. I was not speaking about art, I was just making paintings. The text was more subject than anything else” (C. Wool, cited in M. Prinzhorn, “Conversation with Christopher Wool”, Museum in Progress, 1997, online). Instead of painting cityscapes or emotive abstractions to parse through his lived urban experience, Wool takes on text and language as his focal point, thus addressing a more universal subject that resonates on different levels with a wide array of viewers.
Acquired by the present owner just a year after it was painted, Untitled has an especially active surface, a fact that is only further emphasized by Wool’s use of colored paint to render each block letter. Using the whole spectrum, he spells out the phrase “FUCKEM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE”, omitting punctuation and ignoring proper spacing as he does in the rest of the series. The use of color here gives a deeper insight into Wool’s seemingly straightforward process. In the black works, one could be excused for thinking each stenciled glyph was applied in order until the phrase of completed. However, in this particular example, one is rewarded for looking closer. Under higher scrutiny, it becomes clear that Wool painted the letters in one color before returning to overpaint in a different shade. The dripping, pulsating pigment on the surface hides this initial coat in some cases, but in others, like the first ‘K’ and the ‘F’ of the word ‘IF’, the base layer pushes through. In the first ‘C’, a halo of red glows beneath the verdant green, and in the ‘T’ below a yellow aura radiates on the edge of midnight blue. It oozes at the periphery of the otherwise clean and orderly shapes and, juxtaposed with the vertical drips of paint, helps to create a visually dynamic composition that oscillates between being readable as text or image. Furthermore, the grain of the coarse brush is visible in each stroke as light catches darker undercoating peering through thin coverage areas. By creating this visual intrigue, Wool successfully disconnects our normal habit of reading letters for information and instead allows us to explore the pictorial qualities presented.
The word paintings are inextricably linked to the buzzing energy of the urban space, specifically New York City. Pulling inspiration from a variety of sources, Wool transmutes words and found phrases into blaring aphorisms. By doing so, he separates the letters and sentences from their origins in an attempt to investigate language itself and its place in our daily lives. “He has long been fascinated by the way words function when removed from the quiet authority of the page and exposed to the cacophony of the city, whether through the blaring incantations of billboards and commercial signage or the illicit interventions of graffiti artists,” noted Katherine Brinson on the occasion of Wool’s 2013 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, “But with their velvety white grounds and stylized letters rendered in dense, sign painter’s enamel that pooled and dripped within the stencils, the word paintings have a resolute material presence that transcends the graphic.” (K. Brinson, Ibid., p. 40). Embracing the bold style of tags and street art, Wool creates an amalgam that pulls the audience in immediately.
Basquiat loved the ‘do-it-yourself’ bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with the fringe New York, the no man’s land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world, Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions.(G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, pp. 10-11).
Basquiat loved the ‘do-it-yourself’ bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with the fringe New York, the no man’s land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world, Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions.(G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, pp. 10-11).Wool studied painting for a brief period at the New York Studio School before dropping out to explore the thriving music and underground film scene happening in the late 1970s and 80s. This segue would prove revelatory for his art practice later on as he re-emerged as a painter of abstractions that took ideas of aesthetics and ornament to task. Channeling the nonstop energy of the East Village and similar cultural neighborhoods during that period, he looked to the same urban markers of culture and creative progress as his peers like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Glenn O’Brien remarked about this connection, noting, “Basquiat loved the ‘do-it-yourself’ bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with the fringe New York, the no man’s land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world, Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions” (G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, pp. 10-11). Especially interested in the role of graffiti, stencils, and reproducible imagery, Wool’s practice hovered between expressive experimentation and Pop. When these two elements met in his studio, he successfully pulled the outside chaos of the city into his work and transfigured base elements into talismans of the era.
The word painting series had its origins on the streets of Manhattan. While walking in his Lower East Side neighborhood in the late 1980s, Wool happened upon a brand new truck covered in the simplest of graffiti. On the white metal of the vehicle, someone had spray-painted the words ‘SEX LUV’ in stenciled letters. The immediacy of the fresh paint on the pristine metal captivated the artist and he recalls returning to his studio immediately to create a work using the same tactics. This first iteration spawned numerous variants in black and white until 1993 when the current example was realized in vivid color. The words and letters that Wool uses in these paintings function more as a tool for exploration rather than simple information providers.
Though his text-based innovations were the artist’s breakthrough series, they fit cohesively into a larger investigation that has spanned the entirety of Wool’s career. In the late 1980s, around the time that he began the word paintings, the painter noticed a worker using a specialized roller made for painting repeating patterns on walls as a cheaper alternative to wallpaper. Fascinated by this process, Wool began a series that employed a similar device but swapped in black enamel to more fully emphasize the graphic qualities of the design when applied to a panel of white-painted aluminum. In conversation with the word paintings, these roller paintings engage in a similar mode of inquiry that takes into consideration found forms and self-imposed limitations inherent to the method of production. Stencils, the rollers, and later works that leverage silkscreening all point to Wool’s ability to make work that juxtaposes evidence of the working process with the dynamism of the end result. Ann Goldstein, writing about this fact for a retrospective of Wool’s work, noted, “Through process, technique, scale, composition, and imagery, Wool’s work accentuates the tensions and contradictions between the act of painting, the construction of a picture, its physical attributes, the visual experience of looking at it, and the possibilities of playing with and pushing open the thresholds of its meanings. They are defined by what they’re not – and what they hold back” (A. Goldstein, cited in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Los Angeles, The Museum Of Contemporary Art (And Travelling), 1998, P. 263). By emphasizing process and highlighting ‘mistakes’ like drips and uneven application, Wool addresses painting itself through a conceptual lens.
At their core, Wool’s word paintings are an exceptionally nuanced conversation about text and image relationships, semiotics, and the ways in which we absorb and deliver information in a language-based society. Using letters and words as his subject, the meaning one extracts from the artist’s wry phrases are only the beginning of a true understanding of pieces like Untitled. Indeed, the present example makes this more clear than any of its brethren, making it a particularly important member of the group. By fixating on color and the overlap of paint in conjunction with the words themselves, Wool sets up an internal dialogue about ways of looking. In a conversation about this subject with Martin Prinzhorn, the artist admits, “I always considered myself involved with painting. I can’t imagine someone seeing one of those and not realizing it’s a painting. I think, the way I used text was not didactic. I was not speaking about art, I was just making paintings. The text was more subject than anything else” (C. Wool, cited in M. Prinzhorn, “Conversation with Christopher Wool”, Museum in Progress, 1997, online). Instead of painting cityscapes or emotive abstractions to parse through his lived urban experience, Wool takes on text and language as his focal point, thus addressing a more universal subject that resonates on different levels with a wide array of viewers.