CHRISTOPHER WOOL | THREE WOMEN (MEDIUM I, II, III)

Reductions and erasures exist alongside slips and misalignments, manifesting a tension between depth and flatness.” Simon Lee Gallery

Throughout his career, Christopher Wool has explored the possibilities of abstract painting, creating a body of work that defies easy codification. In 1998, Wool began duplicating his own paintings, using screenprint to transpose the image onto a new canvas and then reworking the reproduction further. This self-appropriation and the dichotomy of original gestural mark-making and a replicative method that removes the importance of the artist’s hand marked a new phase in Wool’s practice. According to the curator Katherine Brinson, “The resolutory even effect of the silkscreen process and the attendant possibility of layering multiple screenings allowed Wool to create dense strata of imagery without any formal element gaining special prominence.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Christopher Wool, 2014, p. 43) Wool’s monumental triptych Three Women (Medium I, II, III) is an arresting manifestation of the possibilities screenprinting provided the artist and exemplifies his investigation into the juxtaposition between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness.

Three Women (Medium I, II, III) was included in the 2007 group show Door Cycle, presented by Edition Schellmann Contemporary Art Production in collaboration with Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The inspiration for the exhibition came from a series of works that Willem de Kooning painted between 1964 and 1966 that were later exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 14 - May 26, 1996. De Kooning painted a series of larger-than-life female figures on hollow-core wood doors which had previously been installed in his studio. The resulting works, including Woman, Sag Harbor (1964) and Woman (1965), were called the Door Cycle and are considered a benchmark in the artist’s career. Influenced by de Kooning’s work and acknowledging the metaphoric power of the door, Edition Schellman determined that “with its flat, empty surface, light weight and painting-size, the mass-produced door panel seemed to be an appropriate contemporary product to make works in editions with.” Several artists, including Christopher Wool, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick and Anish Kapoor, were invited by Edition Schellmann to create works of art on prefabricated hollow-core doors. The resulting 16 works include paintings, screenprint, sculpture and relief on wood, glass, steel and paper. Wool’s contribution to the show is both an homage to de Kooning’s Woman paintings and a reflection of the importance of the use screenprint in his work.