Christopher Wool - Under the Influence New York Tuesday, September 16, 2014 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Schellmann Contemporary Art Production, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Petzel Gallery, DOOR CYCLE, June 29 – August 11, 2007 (another example exhibited)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I remember Richard Prince once said, ‘As a photographer I am practicing without a license.’ I basically feel the same when I work with silk-screens. Rather than making my work technically perfect, I like to find my own way…That is what I find so stimulating, I never know how long each work will take. It simply has to evolve at its own pace.” Christopher Wool, 2006

    Christopher Wool has been reinvigorating contemporary abstraction since he first burst onto the scene in New York in the early 1980s – a time and location in which non-representational painting had reached its nadir. Drawing from the dark underbelly of the human psyche and urban environs, Wool’s oeuvre is marked by its often monochromatic, stark palette and utilization of various media including printmaking and photography.

    Three Women (Light I) from 2005 is a superb example of Wool’s translation of his painterly advancements into the medium of screen-printing. The mechanized process of the screen-print was already an integral aspect of his painting process, which managed to couple Pop iconography and methodology in the screen-printed motif along with Abstract Expressionist movement and dynamism of his over-painting and determined destruction. Here, Wool has confounded the viewer’s preconceived notion and inverted the usual arrangement by creating an expressionist abstraction which he then translated back into a mechanically reproducible image.

    Christopher Wool is clearly one of the most important artists of the current epoch. The present lot is prototypical Wool at his most masterly and innovative, blending forms of mark-making and reproduction in one violent yet harmonious whole. Three Women (Light I) perfectly reflects Wool’s masterful innovation and ability to expose new possibilities across visual media, especially printmaking.

49

Three Women (Light I)

2005
silkscreen on Saunders Watercolor paper
sheet 81 1/2 x 50 in. (207 x 127 cm.)
frame 85 1/2 x 53 3/4 x 2 in. (217.2 x 136.5 x 5.1 cm.)

Signed, numbered, inscribed and dated "Wool 2005 PP 1/1 I" along the lower margin.
This work is printer's proof 1 from an edition of 9 plus 3 artist's proofs, with variants in shades of light, medium and dark rose.

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $161,000

Contact Specialist
Benjamin Godsill
bgodsill@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1260

Under the Influence

New York 16 September 2014 11am