Christopher Wool - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; Private Collection, France

  • Catalogue Essay


    Within Christopher Wool’s body of work, we can observe a contrast between text based works and those based on ornamentation. Wool’s ornamental works are created by applying and layering patterns such as floral designs, simple linear flourishes or arabesques, through the use of rollers, stamps or a various spray applications. The resulting creation is an “all over” painting keeping in the tradition of Pollock; one which disregards composition and nuances.
    U. Loock in B. Curiger, ed., Birth of the Cool: American Painting from Georgia O’Keefe to Christopher Wool, Hamburg/Zurich, 1997
    In 1995 Christopher Wool began creating works where the surface pigment is applied using a spray gun. The subsequent compositions were tangled masses of lines with the highly fluid black pigment left to drip down the surface of the panel. The present lot Untitled (P447) is a striking example of a more recent work which illustrates clearly a progression that Wool has made with his approach to the treatment of the composition.
    Hints of the dark tangled conglomeration of sprayed lines are visible randomly scattered throughout the surface, however, with this work Wool has taken to erasing or blurring areas. Erasure is not a new element to his paintings. “This erasure is not an entirely new concept in Wool’s oeuvre, in 1997 overpainting with white becomes very specifically about erasure— erasure as process of producing and articulating an image… the white paint that covers aspects of them reinforces the “negative space” of the picture plane as it echoes the original ground of the surface. Wool’s work accentuates the tensions and contradictions between the act of painting, the construction of a picture, its physical attributes, the visual experience of looking at it, and the possibilities of playing with and pushing open the thresholds of its meanings. They are defined by what they’re not—and by what they hold back” (A. Goldstein, WOOL, Los Angeles, 1998).

119

Untitled (P447)

2004

Enamel on linen.

96 1/4 x 71 1/2 in. (244.5 x 181.6 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “Wool (P447) 2004” on the reverse.

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Sold for $626,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York