“To me the paintings felt as if they’d simply appeared—like the writing on the wall, or like the world before you know anything about it—rather than painted by a person in time, despite the drips and the layering.”
—Richard Hell

Visually imposing and immediately disarming, Christopher Wool’s Untitled, 1997 is an image indebted to its time – the grit of the New York punk and art scene, the angst of the Bowery’s CBGB music club and the graffiti-covered walls of the Lower East Side. Featuring the starkly stencilled words ‘YOU MAKE ME’, Untitled exemplifies Wool’s text-based practice that defined his rise to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s downtown scene. Employing raw materials such as metal and using bold, blocky lettering reminiscent of urban signage, Wool’s word paintings challenge immediate legibility, delving into the ambiguity of language whilst pushing the limits of painting itself.

 

Drawing from a wide range of cultural influences, Wool's inspiration here is the 1977 album Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids. Wool’s chosen words are those scrawled across Hell’s bare chest on the album cover, his direct gaze echoed in Wool's own confrontational address here. Central to the early punk scene in Lower Manhattan alongside contemporaries such as Patti Smith, Hell’s Blank Generation is a deliberately messy uproar of angst. In Hell’s version of the phrase, he invites the viewer to complete the phrase with an underlined blank. Wool’s version, typical of his word painting syntax, confines the words to a four-by-four grid and stacks them one on top of the other, leaving the phrase unpunctured with a blank space underneath, a gap for the viewer to complete. 

 

Richard Hell & the Voidoids, ‘Blank Generation’

 

Unlike other word paintings where Wool appropriates fragments of text, his meeting with Richard Hell was a deliberate act of collaboration. Wool approached Hell to request consent to use the words, a gesture Hell appreciated, noting, ‘Which of course he didn’t have to do. I mean, that was really courteous. It’s not like I own those words.’ⁱ This initial encounter revealed a mutual artistic respect, highlighting their shared fascination with semantics and syntax. A few years after rising to fame, Hell retired from music to focus on writing. More recently, the pair collaborated on a project called Psychopts, in which they turned pairs of words into images that appeared to trick the eye into anticipating another word. Wool explained, ‘Our project didn’t have anything to do with changing those words, or reassessing those words. They were just images we started with—a project that perfectly encapsulated Wool’s approach.ⁱⁱ

“For me, Wool captures the ways New York looks, sounds, and smells in our time, much as Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings embody the city’s texture in the fifties. I see Wool creating new order out of all this chaos. I see little epiphanies and glean the same clashing, gritty, seemingly haphazard, abrasive, bludgeoning beauty that all of us who live in and love New York can’t live without”
—Jerry Saltz

Wool's word paintings can be traced back to an encounter in the early 1980s with a truck bearing the graffiti ‘SEX LUV’ on its powdery white surface. Moved by the raw simplicity of the letters, stripped of context and exposed to the urban fabric, Wool chose to use text as a medium to explore the boundaries of painting. Similar text-based interventions were undertaken by artists such as Joseph Kosuth a decade earlier. Kosuth’s minimalist, uniform text works sought to make language the content of the art, collapsing description and image into each other. Wool’s post-minimalist approach takes a further departure, being ‘less concerned with language as a means to transcend image, or with the problematic conjunction of text and image, than with text as an image’.ⁱⁱⁱ The careful construction of Wool's paintings, often arranged on aluminium with a geometric grid, transforms each sloping letter into a painterly object. The stray drips and splashes of paint on each letter imbue a sense of urgency, recalling the graffiti artists of downtown New York.

 

Composed a decade after the start of his first experimentation with word paintings, Untitled seems unique in its duality, a powerful example of Wool’s exploration of the limits of painting and the ambiguity of syntax as well as the burst of punk energy that projected Hell and Wool to prominence in 1980s. The present work also stands as a testament to the friendship and continued artistic collaboration between the pair, both figures having pushed the boundaries of the visual and musical fields reflecting the experiences of young artists working in the urban environment of the early 1990s.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• In 2024, Christopher Wool and curator Anne Pontégnie organised an exhibition titled ‘See Stop Run’ (14 March-28 July) which featured 72 of his works displayed in a vacant, derelict lower Manhattan office space. The exhibition was heralded by critics as hugely successful, timely and unique. Writing for the Brooklyn Rail Richard Hell claims, ‘You have to see this show or you will regret missing it. I’m not aware of anything much like it at any time recently or otherwise’
   

• A larger scale version of the present work, Untitled, 1997 is part of Tate’s permanent collection.
   

• Christopher Wool’s works have been widely exhibited in prominent international institutions, including major solo shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is included in numerous noteworthy international collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London

 

 

ⁱ Richard Hell in Christopher Wool & Richard Hell, Interview Magazine, online.

ⁱⁱ Christopher Wool in Christopher Wool & Richard Hell, Interview Magazine, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Katherine Brinson, ‘Trouble is my Business’ in Chrstopher Wool, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013, p.40.