Christopher Wool

Best known for the large, black, stencilled letters on white canvases, American contemporary artist, Christopher Wool, creates an artistic language that manifests both tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. Wools multidisciplinary oeuvre draws on elements of Conceptual and Minimal art, they often encompass enigmatic, confrontational phrases or illegible scribbles which are then either stencilled or plastered across the canvas. His process includes the possibilities of reproduction, appropriation and accretion, which is then as important as the results they create. 

Born in Chicago in 1955, Wool moved to New York when he was just 18 years old and enrolled in Studio School studies. After a brief period of formal training in painting, he dropped out of mainstream education and instead dived into the underground of film and music. He quickly began experimenting with a new type of artistic process, using hand rollers to apply paint to the canvas, thus removing typical painterly qualities. 

In the late 1980s, Wool reached his mature style, creating word paintings featuring alliterative statements, or phrases with the removal of vowels. Using a rubber stamp, he could construct a pattern and apply paint with a roller, aiding to the urban graffiti influence of his earlier works. Since the early 90s, the silkscreen has been Wool’s primary artistic tool. His abstract paintings fuse figures and the disfigured. He draws lines on the canvas, then eliminates them with a rag drenched in solvent aiding to a new picture in which lines stand on their own against smeared surfaces.

Christopher Wool’s artistic language has accomplished recording breaking auction prices. His most famous painting ‘Apocalypse Now’, sold for $26.5 million at Christies in 2013.