Beschreibung:

Christopher Wool Untitled (S176) 2005 enamel on linen 52 x 38 in. (132.1 x 96.5 cm) Signed, titled and dated "Wool 2005 (S176)" on the reverse of the mount.
Provenance Taka Ishii Gallery, Japan Exhibited New York, New York Studio School, The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School, Part 2, 1972-1978, February 17 - May 7, 2005 Catalogue Essay “Is it a painting or a process?....You take color out, you take gesture out --- and then later you can put them in. But it’s easier to define things by what they’re not than by what they are.” Christopher Wool Looking objectively at the conventions of painting, wrestling with its traditions and questioning its foundations from within, is a seemingly volatile stance for any artist. Herein lays the mastery of Christopher Wool’s work: his unrelenting pursuit of his chosen medium of painting can be, at times, unforgiving. Every approach he adopts is carefully balanced. Wool’s renegade use of technique is weighted with a sense of admiration for the painterly tradition. For the artist, the physical act of painting and its resulting spontaneity have carefully mapped lines; he creates rules and boundaries within his method and process. Amidst the seeming chaos of the tempestuous and hazy strokes, Wool carefully structures his approach to medium and subject. The resulting work is visually arresting, almost alarming, retaining a delicate and intricate quality. Decisive and yet undefined, coherent and yet frantic, Christopher Wool’s Untitled, 2005, confronts us, unabashedly, in the artist’s signature style. Swathes of untamed grey and navy enamel course throughout the canvas, obscuring what might perhaps be a more representational composition underneath. Perhaps initially, we are struck with how Wool has visualized a sort of destruction—the marks seem to reflect the moment in which the artist is tearing something up, washing it over, and starting again. Questions loom. What are we witnessing? We know this isn’t an artistic tantrum; each layer of paint is definitive—purposeful in its interaction with its surroundings. Logic has been applied; there is structure. This is Wool’s way of painting from within. Described by Jerry Saltz as, “one of the more optically alive painters out there,” Christopher Wool’s simultaneously reductive and additive process incorporates a visual vocabulary and syntax adopted from pop culture. Wool’s work is “a very pure version of something dissonant and poignant. His all-or-nothing, caustic-cerebral, ambivalent-belligerent gambit is riveting and even a little thrilling.” (J. Saltz, “Hard Attack,” The Village Voice, November 2004). In the instance of Untitled, 2005, Wool expands the limits of painting through a nuanced and subtle appropriation of the graffiti he absorbed on the streets of 1970s New York. The artist subsequently took photos of the street art that intrigued him, contributing to the genesis for works like the present lot, Untitled, 2005. Drawn to the order in the disorder and its innate spontaneity, Wool’s oeuvre draws parallels to the primal touch of the Abstract Expressionists. Paintings like Untitled, 2005, are deeply rooted in the heritage of Post-War abstraction as well as the gritty vernacular of street culture, celebrating and expanding painterly potential. Using a spray gun filled with enamel, the artist created a complex network of incoherent shapes and symbols, which belie a linguistic degeneration. This sub-layer painting is an elegant transformation of text into image; Wool takes the vernacular of street “tagging” and removes the guise of linguistic order, abstracting the textual forms, while still keeping them recognizable. The drips of the enamel paint, for instance, enliven Wool’s strokes, providing further visual allusion to the dialectical tone of street art. Through erasure and addition, the artist’s mark-making is further transformed into a bold play of surface and depth. Wool uses a solvent-soaked cloth to blur and wipe away portions of the monochromatic composition, effectively reconstructing the surface of the canvas. This physical act of reduction emphasises the formal qualitie