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09.13
Eight New Paintings by Christopher Wool at Gagosian in Rome
Christopher
Wool, Untitled, 2009. Silkscreen ink on linen, 120 X 96 in. Photo:
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
ROME.-Gagosian Gallery
presents an exhibition of eight new paintings by Christopher Wool. In a
fugue of gestural restraint and release, Wool filters the fundaments of
abstract painting through the gritty syntax of urban reality. 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.
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 luminal traces of
previous elements, putting reproduction and negation to generative use
in forming a new chapter in contemporary painting. His paintings,
therefore, can be defined as much by what they are not and what they hold back as what they are.
In new works to be seen for the first time in Rome, Wool continues
to conflate the oppositional foundations of modern painting – the
directness and immediacy of human mark making with the mediating effects
of mechanical and digital reproduction. Silkscreen is the foundation on
top of which he employs an array of techniques -- including stenciling,
rolling, dripping, dragging, and spray-painting – to wrest increasingly
muscular iterations from his established repertoire. Combining
reproduction and over-painting, he repeatedly reworks the images,
photographing the paintings and screening the resulting photographic
images onto linen. In some instances, he plants a caesura in the
composition with a swathe or blot of viscous enamel paint. Thus this
intense and protracted process emerges as both substance and subject of
the work, a terse paean to the unending contingencies of life and
change.
Christopher Wool was born in Chicago in 1955. He has participated
widely in international exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1989), the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles (1998), and Kunsthalle Basel (1998). His work is part
of numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New
York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Basel; Centre
Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. Wool lives and works in New
York City.
