What Art Medium Is This Site Primarily for? Rubber Stamp Chat

"I think of myself primarily as an abstract painter, but I discover that in making paintings at that place is a little fleck of investigation into what abstract painting can exist."

1 of seven

"These other mediums [photography, creative person's books, painting, digital work] kind of loop dorsum on each other in the work."

two of vii

"Painting is a visual medium, and they're to be looked at. Like listening to music, information technology'southward an emotional experience."

iii of 7

"The tools have changed and the ways of exploring visual things accept expanded. But it's not a paradigm shift, it's the aforementioned quondam paradigm."

4 of 7

"If you're not fearless about changes, then you won't progress."

5 of seven

"I am interested in visual linguistic communication."

6 of 7

"With Basquiat or Picasso, the fact that they could practice it so easily is what makes the work so great. They had absolute fearlessness."

7 of seven

Summary of Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool is an enigmatic abstract painter whose formal experimentation and satirical subversion has left him both commercially successful and acclaimed by some critics, whilst condemned as banal or superficial by others. His public persona is reserved, and he advisedly monitors the boundary between his personal and private life.

Wool's work is grounded in an investigation of abstruse painting through a postmodern repurposing of signs and symbols. Familiar images, including stark black and white patterns, shapes, and particularly words are repeated, manipulated and erased. His well-nigh famous works, the 'give-and-take paintings', are large canvases silkscreened with phrases that suggest graffiti slogans, lines from movies or idiot box shows, or other recognizable material. The framing of such works every bit abstract paintings is designed to question what painting is, how information technology should be produced, and how an image can incorporate multiple layers of significant that are revealed by the viewer's attention.

Accomplishments

• Wool deploys recognizable or familiar forms (patterns, words or fifty-fifty classic expressionist painting techniques) to question the medium and a viewer'southward ability to divine meaning from it. By making words seem strange past placing them in a grid system and disrupting their power to be read, for example, he asks that the viewer sees them equally both an abstract shape and equally something that conveys direct meaning. This causes the viewer to question their artful attentions and how they perceive the world around them, as well as any formal preconceptions virtually abstract painting.
• Wool's work brings the exterior earth into the rarified and perchance remote sphere of abstract fine art, particularly through his photography. This work is often expressionistic: using focus, perspective, or the frame of the image in creative ways, but taking as its discipline the street or city that surrounds him and his studio - grounding his work in everyday life.
• Whilst abstract images, his paintings, and peculiarly the ones which include text, demonstrate influences from other artforms, whether pop cultural allusion or graffiti-esque slogans that evoke narrative. Apocalypse Now (1988), for case, is a formal rendering of a line from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 flick of the same proper name - 'Sell the House, Sell the Machine, Sell the Kids'. This implicitly questions the notion of 'high art' or 'pure expression', suggesting that even abstruse painting is informed, influenced and inspired by mass media and everyday encounters.
• Wool maintains an air of mystery around his personal life and reveals little about his processes or intention, which relates to his emphasis on individual experience and interpretation. This also echoes other artists and creative movements, about notably Warhol, who famously claimed that his painting revealed anything a viewer might demand to know almost him.

Biography of Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool was born in Boston in 1955 to Glorye and Ira Wool, a psychiatrist and a molecular biologist. That aforementioned year the family moved to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, where Wool was brought upwards alongside his younger brother Jonathon. In 1959, when Wool was four years old, the family moved to Cambridge, England, where they remained for 1 year before returning to Chicago.

Important Art by Christopher Wool

Progression of Art

1988

Untitled

This piece of work is a decorative black blueprint, made with incised rollers on a painted aluminum white background. Information technology is 1 of Wool'due south earlier surviving works and exemplifies his exploration of floral and 'grille-like' patterns through a style often associated with wallpaper. During this fourth dimension Wool was likewise experimenting with various types of rubber stamps, which, merely like the rollers, were incised with repeating motifs and patterns of vines or trellises, exploring the same sense of repetition and seriality.

By using paint rollers or stamps that are traditionally used to give walls a 'wallpapered' appearance, Wool brings in more than 'ordinary' and commonplace visual signatures into the frame of conceptual fine art. Following the legacy previously divers by Andy Warhol, the work twists the very conception of painting every bit something unique and singular. Past rejecting colour and limerick, it makes an attempt to define a new type of painting, devoid of all the traditions of the past. In fact, the work carries within itself a profoundly post-conceptualist approach to painting, aiming to 'clarify' that art does not need to carry an inherent meaning within itself, but rather act as a bearer of an ongoing experimentation and dialogue within a larger creative prototype.

The work also possesses an inherent "humour of their cool efficiency", as claimed by art critic Peter Schjeldahl. From this perspective, the piece of work takes on a satirical nature, i not but derived from the rejection of art history, only also by the fact that the very creation echoes the traditional wall patterns that adorn American households.

Incised rollers with enamel on aluminium - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

1990

Untitled

The painting is a large white aluminum plate painted with black letters that, once decoded, read 'Run Dog Run Domestic dog Run'. The harsh capital letters were stenciled on, following a standardized grid-similar spacing system. The composition simply allows meaning to be divined on closer attention, when the letters or words are read individually or out loud. This piece of work is part of Wool's wider 'give-and-take painting' series that began in the belatedly 1980s and which found his best-known and most commercially sought-after body of piece of work. As here, all the works in the series consist of letters and words stenciled, using a like a filigree system or organisation. This non-standard spacing and suspension-up of the words often brand them difficult to read, whilst at other times Wool removes some or all of the vowels, transposing TRBL for 'problem', for example. These paintings were beginning shown at the 303 Gallery in 1988, in a collaborative exhibition entitled Apocalypse Now with Robert Gober. As suggested by this championship, referencing Francis Ford Coppola'south Apocalypse Now (1979), allusion to film, television and other art forms is often made through the selection of words depicted. Here, 'Run Dog Run Dog Run' echoes a nursery rhyme or folktale composition, suggesting over again a connection between art forms.

Whilst Wool'southward word paintings echo Ed Ruscha's portraits filled with words, or the works of Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer, Schjeldahl suggests that Wool makes the use of language completely new, by merging "the bearding aggression of graffiti with the stateliness of formal abstract painting", creating a dichotomy between what is 'readable' while however remaining somewhat abstruse. In this way, the works likewise entreatment as a sort of 'nonsensical graphic design'. Art critic Achim Hochdorfer similarly adds that these word paintings "say a lot without saying nothing at all", emphasizing the semiotic contradictions that these words contain.

Enamel on aluminium - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

2001

Untitled

The work features a series of black marks, patterns, brushstrokes and spray-painted contorting lines, painted over with white paint in abrupt vertical lines. It demonstrates Wool'due south use of silkscreen techniques which he began using as a primary tool from the early 1990s. The piece of work establishes and expresses a series of dualities, especially that of the invisible/visible and chaos/club. Chaos, randomness and intuitive expression are symbolized in the underlying blackness design, and club, reason, logic and simplicity are emphasized through the white forms. Hochdorfer suggests that this blurs the distinction between polar opposites, betwixt what is visible and what is unseen, taking it's 'blurring equally a precondition of perception'. It also demonstrates Wool'due south ambivalent arroyo to painting, as it uses both planned pattern-making alongside spontaneous bursts of inventiveness.

This dialogue betwixt abstraction and class besides greatly emphasizes painting as a medium, questioning its autonomy and limits by creating a "edge conflict betwixt pictorial immanence and its undoing", every bit Hochdorfer writes. The underlying expressive gestures of black 'chaos' beneath, by being 'covered upwardly' by white, might besides be seen to establish an analogy or a metaphor with Wool'south own desire to annihilate expressive gesture from painting. In fact, much of his work is characterized by a calculated, predictable and orderly arroyo.

Wool's use of silkscreen, a printing technique that consists of masking function of a mesh with an impermeable substance was inspired by Andy Warhol. Wool layers this press within a painting, "reinvigorating the pictorial composition".

This piece of work too seems to recapture elements of Abstruse Expressionism, prompting writer Cornelius Tittel to ask whether Wool recognizes the irony that by including expressionist gestures in his work Wool continues its legacy. This might contradict his own before claim towards negation of the formal techniques of painting. Wool is non concerned with these credible disparities, just suggests that he only aims to explore painting itself in the contemporary earth: either as a denial of the human action of cosmos (through words) or past creating new dialogues derived from existing artistic contexts.

Enamel and silkscreen ink on linen - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

2004

Untitled

The Untitled motion picture features an empty street at night in New York. Captured in a loftier blackness and white dissimilarity, it is marked by the bright lights from the traffic lights and from the buildings in the background, and past its strange tilting composition. This work was included in Wool's Due east Broadway Breakdown (2004) book, a project began in mid-1990s, and finally completed in 2002. The volume is composed of 160 blackness and white photographs, all taken at night with a 35mm camera as the artist wandered the streets betwixt the Lower E Side and Chinatown, the neighborhood where he has lived and worked for 25 years. Other images characteristic stains on buildings, puddles, abandoned dogs, sidewalks, cars, hallways, trash bins, bags of garbage or patrolling police force cars, almost of which are out of focus or characteristic the same strange angles that grant the work a mysterious, random and even "careless" quality.

This foreign perspective makes this piece of work seem to exist in a place between abstraction and representation, a motif that underlies much of Wool's broader photographic work. Despite the diverseness of themes and subjects, they all seem to portray a sense of desolation, estrangement, confinement and anonymity. For their portrayal of American culture, they could exist seen to echo the photographs of Robert Frank, such as The Americans (1958). Critic Ken Johnson emphasizes another aspect when he explains that by showing the least "bonny things imaginable", Wool finds "his own kind of grungy beauty". These works can therefore be seen to subvert established conceptions of beauty past searching for the aesthetic of destruction. Critic Achim Hochdorfer adds that it "appears to represent a kind of primal scene of expressionist fine art", greatly emphasizing the emotion and gestural content inside the torso of work. Wool's photographic works, although extremely different to his paintings, suggest some important analogies between both mediums, as he seems to explore the same "gestures", marks, and randomness in both.

Photograph on paper - East Broadway Breakup

2005

She Smiles for the Photographic camera I

The work is a large-scale abstraction, with complex layers of lines and washes of paint. It represents the shift in Wool's paintings that occured during the early 2000s, when he began to utilise his own previous work equally material by photographing and silkscreening to develop new works. In this group of paintings, commonly known as his 'grayness works', Wool farther reworks the silkscreens in a complex artistic process. Through paint or the spraying of enamel, he adds and combines a series of original gestures, so removing parts of the painting through the apply of towels soaked in turpentine. Wool claims that the work "starts somewhere and progresses by reacting on itself", greatly emphasising the push and pull that defines this ambiguous process. Alternating between erasing and drawing, wiping away and calculation, the work reveals various cycles of compositions, in a complex game of gestures and 'interruptions'.

In this way, the work can be seen to repeat the gestural creations of the Abstract Expressionists artists, only as Hans Hofmann and Marker Rothko created works through the push and pull of overlapping layers. Because of this continuous bicycle, curator Katherine Brinson claims that in one work, Wool unifies "the traces of multiple past moments of cosmos, as images return in new guises to be considered afresh inside Wool's evolving pictorial investigations". However, with Wool, this approach is more innovative, as it aims to capture not only the process of art equally an end consequence, but the overlapping and juxtaposition of multiple timeframes in one unmarried creation. This work not simply expresses issues of procedure, replication, and digital manipulation, only also reflects the very act of 'cocky-negation', improvisation and constant questioning that defines much of Wool's work.

Enamel and silkscreen on linen

2007

Untitled

The work is a photograph that depicts role of an abstract painting. Blackness lines are fatigued over swipes and dashes of paint, and layered canvases. It was created in collaboration with the artist Josh Smith, with who Wool has been collaborating for many years. It is part of a larger body of work entitled Can Your Monkey Do The Canis familiaris, which was displayed in an exhibition and published as a book.

Information technology is the unique collaborative process, i that promotes a 'silent' artistic dialogue, that heightens the significance of this work. Through a process of digital imaging and the utilize of editing programs, the artists create artworks by "four easily". One of the artists proposes an paradigm from their torso of piece of work, and the other artist adds to information technology, reworking it digitally by adding and/or removing elements as he chooses. The image is so sent back to the first artist, who can leave the work as it is, or add together a third layer to the work in a similar process. Once both artists are satisfied, the finalized creation is then converted to black and white. Since throughout the whole process there is no painting actually involved, only the digital re-working of previous works through photographs, fine art critic Vera Kotaji suggest that it explores the viewing of art rather than the process itself. She claims that we understand that the very "thought of a painting means getting closer to its (the idea of its) mode of reproduction". The distant and mechanical approach of using a computer is a deprival of the very act of painting, one that places technology at the very center of gimmicky fine art product and redefines traditional conceptions of artistic collaboration.

Photo on paper - Can Your Monkey Do The Domestic dog Collaboration with Josh Smith, Michele Didier Gallery

2008

Untitled

This work consists of out of focus words, layered atop each other in the heart of the page. Upon closer attending, the words are revealed to read 'impatient' and 'impotent'. It is part of a larger body of work and collaboration between Wool and the writer and musician Richard Hell, 1 of the originators of punk in New York. Developed throughout a year, the artist and the musician gathered once every week in a spontaneous and informal gathering, where they created variations of these word paintings. The series joins similar words, creating dichotomies and contrasts through partial homonyms and contrasts. Other pairs of words include: "incest and nicest", "slave and salvage", "anus and stuns" and "perils and penis", all of which merge together in the aforementioned blurred manner.

The differing backgrounds of both artists brings out another dialogue between disciplines in Wool's work, hither combining Hell'south conceptual poetry and art. The use of linguistic communication echoes and questions the dynamics between art, significance and signifier. Mystifying as much as it reveals, the viewer is only left with an cryptic and baffling conclusion, one that hither relates to the very words being observed: an impatient however impotent position.

Christopher Wool and Richard Hell collaboration, Psychopts

2011

Illuminations

This piece of work depicts abstract shapes, spattered beyond the sheet. It is part of a larger body of work that explores random 'stains' of pigment, first shown at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Photographs of these 'surfaces' are expanded and silkscreened. By creating these stains and drips, the work represents and plays with the accidents of matter, echoing the Abstract Expressionist tradition divers by Robert Rauschenberg and his 'shapeless' paintings of the 1950s or by Jackson Pollock's infamous drip works.

But these formal abstract 'compositions' also allude to Rorschach's inkblot psychological tests, invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921. Since the test sustains that the self will classify abstruse forms based on their own perceptual and psychological presets, the work can be seen to mirror this approach, past offering upwards the forms to different interpretations according to the viewer'southward own 'psychological' and imaginative whims. In this perspective, they reference the inner world of the observer.

Fine art critic John Corbett as well claims that the "interweavings of improvisation and composition can exist seen equally dual energy entities", acting each with its own force, exerting "an influence on the methods and processes used". The improvisation brings the viewer'due south attention to the unexpected and the randomness of the process, while the composition acts equally a 'recapturing' of that freedom. For the critic, it is these interweaving and interlocking methods that further keeps the piece of work alive in a dialectical manner.

Enamel and silkscreen ink on linen

2014

Untitled

The piece of work is a statuary sculpture, composed of a contorted wire that seems to ascertain a random nonetheless organic shape. Wool creates these linear, three-dimensional visual forms from wire constitute at his property in Marfa, Texas, a material that is commonly used by farmers to fence their herds. In a fashion, these works are three-dimensional compositions derived from the vocabulary developed in his spray paintings.

Critic Mark Prince accentuates that the sculptures are "teasingly effigy-like, but non quite figurative", greatly emphasizing the ongoing characteristic of most of Wool's trunk of work: that while it reveals something, it also seems to allude to 'nothing', echoing his signature dialogue betwixt figure and abstraction. Prince adds that Wool has always had the ability to "convert this formalism into a statement of loss, the loss of meaning". Some of Wool'southward works, he adds, "are even less signifying than the words and phrases of his text paintings". In this sense, Wool redefines the very status of sculpture, every bit he does with painting: aiming to correspond the absence of representation.

The piece of work also raises the question of who is being addressed, creating a 'ricocheting' subjectivity, where the "source and iteration, interior and exterior, seems to oscillate, switch roles, project and recede like an optical illusion", equally observed past art critic Achim Hochdorfer. In other words, the work profoundly emphasizes the fact that in that location is no inner dialogue betwixt the self and the sculpture, merely an absence that makes the viewer contemplate his own inability to accept what is presented.

Bronze Sculpture - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

Similar Art

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Creative person

• James Nares

• Glenn O'Brien

• 

  Kelley Walker

• Wade Guyton

• Josh Smith

• Dan Colen

• Seth Price

• 

  Robert Gober

• Richard Hell

• Post-Conceptualism

• Post-Modernism

Useful Resource on Christopher Wool

Books

websites

manufactures

video clips

Content compiled and written past Sarah Frances Dias

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Lewis Church

"Christopher Wool Creative person Overview and Analysis". [Net]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Sarah Frances Dias
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added past Lewis Church building
Bachelor from:
First published on 24 May 2018. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

cantuthearkly.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/wool-christopher/

Share this post