Christopher Wool,
2003
Christopher Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases. However, Wool possesses a wide range of style—using a combined array of painterly techniques, including spray paint, silkscreen, and hand painting. Wool provides tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. By painting layer upon layer of whites and off–whites over silkscreened 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.
He studied at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and The New York Studio School, New York. Wool's work has been exhibited extensively around the world in many solo and group exhibitions. Recent solo shows include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (1989); Museum Boymans–van Beuningen, The Netherlands (1991, traveled to Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; and Kölnischer Kunstverein, 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, Switzerland); Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve, Switzerland (1999); Le Consortium, France (2002, traveled to Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, through 2003); Camden Arts Centre, London (2004); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Spain (2006); ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich (2006); Museum de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Portugal (2008, traveled to Museum Ludwig, Germany); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2012); and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013, traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).
