About
Christopher Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he possesses a wide range of styles; using a combined array of painterly techniques, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen-printing, he provides tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. By painting layer upon layer of whites and off-whites over screen-printed elements used in previous works—monochrome forms taken from reproductions, enlargements of details of photographs, screens, and Polaroids of his own paintings—he accretes the surface of his pressurized paintings while apparently voiding their very substance. Only ghosts and impediments to the field of vision remain, each fixed in its individual temporality. Through these various procedures of application and cancellation, Wool obscures the liminal traces of previous elements, putting reproduction and negation to generative use in forming a new chapter in contemporary painting. His paintings can therefore be defined as much by what they are not and what they hold back as what they are.
Wool was born in 1955 in Chicago. He studied at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, and the New York Studio School. Wool’s work has been exhibited extensively around the world in many solo and group exhibitions. Solo shows include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1989); Museum Boymans–van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (1991, traveled to Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany); Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles (1992); Ophiuchus Collection, The Hydra Workshop, Greece (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998, traveled to Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Kunsthalle Basel); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (1999); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2002, traveled to Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, through 2003); Camden Arts Centre, London (2004); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Spain (2006); ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich (2006); Museu de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2008, traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013, traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago).
Wool lives and works in New York.
#ChristopherWool
Exhibitions
Game Changer
Mercedes Matter
Lauren Mahony and Michael Tcheyan pay homage to the founder of the New York Studio School.
Christopher Wool: Part Two
Gray turns to pink or his twenty-first century, much of it in Texas. Text by Richard Hell.
Christopher Wool: Part One
Christopher Wool and his unlikely heroes or conceptual or not? Text by Richard Hell.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
The Bigger Picture
Free Arts NYC
Meredith Mendelsohn discusses the impact of Free Arts NYC and its mission to foster creativity in children and teens, on the occasion of its twenty-year anniversary.
Book Corner
Black Book
Christopher Wool’s Black Book (1989) was selected by Douglas Flamm, a rare-book specialist at Gagosian, for a special focus. Text by Anna Heyward.
Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975
In this video, Christopher Wool, Katy Siegel, and David Reed discuss Reed’s paintings and memories of the New York arts scene in 1975.
New York, 1975
Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool discuss David Reed’s paintings and the New York art scene in 1975.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2021
December 2–4, 2021, booth D5
Miami Beach Convention Center
artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2021 with a presentation of modern and contemporary works. A selection of these works will also appear on gagosian.com and on Art Basel’s Online Viewing Room.
To receive a pdf with detailed information on the works, please contact the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com. To attend the fair, purchase tickets at artbasel.com.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021. Artwork, left to right: © Albert Oehlen; © Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Mary Weatherford. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Fundraiser
Artist Plate Project 2021
Coalition for the Homeless
Launching November 16, 2021, 10am est
Limited-edition bone china plates produced by Prospect and featuring artwork by more than forty artists—including Virgil Abloh, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Alex Israel, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Ed Ruscha, Sarah Sze, Tom Wesselmann, Jonas Wood, and Christopher Wool—will be sold through Artware Editions to raise funds for the Coalition’s lifesaving programs. The funds raised by the sale of the plates will provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can feed one hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers.
Jonas Wood, Clipping Plate, 2021 © Jonas Wood
Support
The Kitchen
Ice and Fire: A Benefit Exhibition in Three Parts
October 15, 2020–March 23, 2021
The benefit exhibition Ice and Fire features works by more than forty artists who have enduring relationships with the Kitchen in New York. Installed within the organization’s three-story space in Chelsea, which is currently closed due to the global pandemic, the three-part exhibition is viewable online. Proceeds from sales will go toward a planned renovation on the occasion of the Kitchen’s fiftieth anniversary, ensuring that the nonprofit space will remain a platform for artistic experimentation in its historic and beloved building. Work by Cecily Brown, Roe Ethridge, Mark Grotjahn, Alex Israel, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, Mary Weatherford, and Christopher Wool is included.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Capri 53.57), 2020 © Mark Grotjahn
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Urs Fischer, Horse/Bed, 2013, installation view, Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome © Urs Fischer. Photo: Alberto Novelli, courtesy Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica
On View
If not now, when?
Collection Max Vorst
Through September 8, 2024
Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, Netherlands
www.beeldenaanzee.nl
If not now, when? features over seventy sculptures and installations in a diverse range of materials from the collection of Max Vorst. The exhibition offers an overview of developments in contemporary sculpture in the twenty-first century. Larger themes such as abstraction and contemporary representations of the human form, among other concepts, are also considered. Work by Theaster Gates, Thomas Houseago, Donald Judd, Adam McEwen, Sterling Ruby, Rudolf Stingel, Jordan Wolfson, and Christopher Wool is included.
Sterling Ruby, Big Yellow Mama, 2013, installation view, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, Netherlands © Sterling Ruby
Closed
A Dark Hymn
Highlights from the Hill Collection
March 1–April 13, 2024
Hill Art Foundation, New York
hillartfoundation.org
A Dark Hymn celebrates the five-year anniversary of the Hill Art Foundation by examining the collection through the lens of Valentin Bousch’s sixteenth-century stained glass window, The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise (1533), which is permanently installed in the foundation’s Chelsea building. The exhibition places work from the four major categories of the collection—Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, old master paintings, canvases and sculptures by modern masters, and contemporary art—in dialogue with the window. Work by Willem de Kooning, Mark Grotjahn, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Rudolf Stingel, Sarah Sze, and Christopher Wool is included.
Installation view, A Dark Hymn: Highlights from the Hill Collection, Hill Art Foundation, New York, March 1–April 13, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Ed Ruscha, © Robert Gober, © Caroline Kent, © Sarah Sze. Photo: Matthew Herrmann
Closed
The Milton and Sheila Fine Collection
November 18, 2023–March 17, 2024
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
carnegieart.org
Milton and Sheila Fine have been longtime advocates and supporters of the arts in their philanthropy throughout the Pittsburgh region. Promised to Carnegie Museum of Art in 2015, their collection of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and drawing reflects their interest in American and German art from the 1980s to the 2000s. This exhibition, which is presented as a celebration and remembrance of Milton Fine, who passed away in 2019, foregrounds the importance and impact of the gift. Work by Richard Artschwager, Georg Baselitz, Mark Grotjahn, Donald Judd, Brice Marden, David Reed, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Wool is included.
Ed Ruscha, Victory, 1987, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh © Ed Ruscha