Christopher Wool

Private Collection, Connecticut
Sotheby's, New York, 15 May 2008, Lot 465
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

This work is in fair condition overall. The surface shows signs of overall craquelure, yet the surface appears entirely stable. There are several horizontal scuffs on the surface of the work. There is a set of two markings 8 inches long, which appear approximately 14 inches from the left edge and 37 inches from the top edge. The second scuff is 1 inch long and is approximately 13 inches from the right edge and 34 inches from the top edge. These scuffs have a slightly brown color in normal light and fluoresce brightly under ultraviolet light. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“Wool controls the chaos, to offer us a kind of primary viewing, the image as a pre-linguistic, pre-thought means of communicating. With their grand scale, bold unapologetic presence and their stark black and white confidence, Wool's paintings seem like an indescribable urban cool, a tense fusion of intellect and emotion, control and chaos."
Katrina M. Brown
Contemporary Magazine, Winter 2003, cited in Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, New York 2008, p. 296

Constituting a dramatic negotiation between artistic agency and effacement, Christopher Wool's Untitled (S157) is a commanding example from the artist's corpus of abstract works. Untitled (S157) perfectly encapsulates Wool’s anarchic painterly enterprise with complexity, juxtaposing the chaotic entropy of the image with the austere stringency of the palette. In every way exemplary of Wool’s specialized approach to painting, Wool’s patterns create a swirl of layered forms that project an aura at once fully resolved and utterly dynamic through a process of addition by subtraction. Wool creates a picture plane rife with action that simultaneously imparts a stark flatness. Untitled (S157) presents the viewer with a formally engaging and intellectually rigorous artistic experience.

Untitled (S157) epitomizes Wool’s capacity to internally scrutinize and reconsider the tradition of the medium via processes of reductionism and recapitulation.  Painted over and over, the gestures of Wool's composition are endlessly requoted and effaced, and further retranslated through digital modes of citation and reproduction. Comprising a condensation of Wool's painterly syntax, Untitled (S157) represents the very culmination of the artist's ironic and almost appropriationist concern with the language of abstraction: "It's as if he's leeched the life out of his vibrant loops, captured them on film, then searched for a way to bring them back to life" (Eric Hall in Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, New York, 2008, p. 371).

Wool’s continued belief in painting’s potential for critical agency has spurred a conceptually challenging oeuvre that deeply engages with the history of painting without reverting to banal or stereotypical cliché. While the all-over quality of his abstract paintings recall the bustling energy of Abstract Expressionism, his deadpan appropriation of urban aesthetics, popular imagery, and even graffiti techniques stand in contrast to the emotive introspection of artists such as Jackson Pollock. Glenn O’Brien aptly reflects on the connection between Wool and this art historical legacy: “…Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a pop artist or dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions the work is singular, strong, organic, and as deep as it might appear shallow” (Glenn O’Brien, ‘Apocalypse and Wallpaper,’ in: Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed.,Wool, Cologne 2012, p. 8).

Throughout his career, Wool has explored a mutating, visually arresting landscape of seemingly mechanical, cipher-like reductions, coolly detached and emptied of heroic angst. Like a vandal taking a spray-can to the wall, Wool simultaneously defaces and makes anew. Adhering to a compelling uniformity inextricably linked to Wool’s abiding interest in sign-painting and the translation of the mechanically reproduced photographic image onto the painterly surface, Wool’s surface maintains a concomitant machine-made quality with a seductive expressionism that lures us into its exhilirating spangles. Epitomizing Wool’s compelling amalgamation of visual restraint and explosive bravado, the present work embodies Marga Paz's deft summary that "[we] are confronted with work that deals with the possibilities and mechanisms that keep painting alive and valid in the present, an issue that, despite all forecasts, is one of the most productive and complex issues in contemporary visual art" (Marga Paz in Exh. Cat., Valencià, IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Christopher Wool, 2006, p. 200). This exceptional work affords highly revealing insight into the processes of construction and destruction of pictorial lexica, as well as the scrutiny and reconsideration of conventions of painting, that have formed the fundamental kernel of Wool’s conceptual and aesthetic enterprise. 

At a time when Neo-Expressionism defined the prevailing aesthetic of the 1980s, Wool, alongside a small enclave of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, scrutinized the role of painting from within the medium itself by creating bodies of work that were inherently self-reflexive and deeply aware of art historical convention. Wool’s paintings are condensed to the limited palette of black and white enamel applied to a linen ground, the flatness of the surface, and the erasure of verisimilitude and privilege of semiotic distillation, rendering a myriad of art historical precedent with sensational economy. Untitled (S157) is defined by the schema of painterly omissions or ‘glitches’ that disrupt the decorative pattern that he has created. The effect is one in which Wool invokes the associative potential of decorative imagery for his scrutiny of contemporary painting; as presciently observed by Gary Indiana for the Village Voice in 1987: “Their decorative qualities are deceptions. The eye doesn’t linger in one place or rove over them registering choice bits, but locks into contact with the surface and freezes …They exercise an almost hideous power, like real mirrors of existence” (Gary Indiana, The Village Voice, March 1987, cited in Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Op. Cit., p. 48).