Christopher Wool

Luhring Augustine, New York

Richard Gray Gallery, New York

Galerie Bastian, Berlin

Blain Southern, London

Private Collection

Sale: Phillips, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 10 February 2014, Lot 8

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Confronting us with the dramatic juxtaposition of artistic creation and negation, Untitled (P492) is a commanding example from Christopher Wool’s celebrated corpus of abstract monochrome paintings. Executed in 2005, the present work is paradigmatic of the series of works on linen that the artist initiated in 2003. These works internally scrutinise and reconsider the tradition of painting via processes of reductionism and recapitulation, stripping down the central facets of the medium to prompt a marriage of the mechanical and the painterly. Depicting ghostly areas of rigorously scrubbed-out paint onto which sporadic loops of spray paint swirl and snake, Untitled (P492) simultaneously embraces the low art form of graffiti and the post-minimalist painting of Brice Marden or the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock.

As though a graffiti artist taking a spray can to the wall, Wool’s frantically exhilarating lines of sepia spray paint in Untitled (P492) simultaneously deface and make anew. Dynamic gestures of abstraction have been reduced to a purely monochrome sepia palette, while the act of dramatic eradication and effacement imbue the work with its characteristic refinement. Executed on linen, this series represents a formative break from Wool's earlier works painted on industrial aluminium. As Ann Goldstein explains: "When, toward the end of the decade, Wool began to use linen as a support for his paintings, this marked a subtle yet significant shift in his work. Though his earlier use of aluminium did not in itself signify a rejection of painting traditions, his use of linen provided him with an opportunity to re-engage the tradition of painting. In exploring the physical, historical, and conceptual properties of this support, he enriched the union of process and picturemaking that is fundamental to his oeuvre" (Ann Goldstein, 'How to Paint', Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, New York 2008, p. 187). What makes this act so compelling is Wool’s own heightened self-reflexivity, through which he confidently redefines the landscape of Modernism whose tenets are so resolutely tied to self-conscious pictorial strategies.

In a progression of series, from his early drip paintings, via his stamped and rolled paintings of vines and floral prints to the celebrated stencilled word pictures, Wool has explored reductive methods informed by a host of art historical sources, such as the geometric landscapes of Piet Mondrian, the all-over action paintings of Pollock, and the lattice-like lines of Cy Twombly. In 2000 Wool once again reconceived the issue of erasure with a dynamic series, of which the present work is part. These pieces were in large part inspired by an accidental discovery that Wool made whilst wiping down a rejected yellow sprayed canvas for a new painting. In scrubbing away at the yellow paint with a rag drenched in turpentine, the canvas itself became a concrete image of erasure, which provoked Wool to explore the notion of “erasure as a picture itself” (Christopher Wool quoted in: ibid, p. 176). As Wool expands, “in a sense I have made erasing the subject of paintings as well as an internal element. If drawing is the positive, the creation of the ‘image’, then erasing is a negative… the process of erasing becomes a picture of ‘doubt’” (Ibid.). The present work thus sees Wool push past the grey tones of his earlier abstract works, literally building upon them with a sepia palette that renders the painting even more visually arresting and entirely engrossing.

In 1981, Douglas Crimp published his seminal text The End of Painting, which articulated the impossibility of a continuation of the medium following the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s. This was a declaration, however, that Wool refused to conform to and, defiantly, in 1981 he returned to painting in earnest following a two year hiatus. At a time when the underlying trend in painting was set by Neo-Expressionism and the Transavantgarde movement, Wool was part of a small group of artists, including Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, who dared to challenge the internal mechanisms of painting itself. Within this art historical context Wool must be understood as one of the most radical and innovative painters working today.