Beschreibung:

9 Christopher Wool Untitled 2003 enamel on linen 274.3 x 182.9 cm (107 7/8 x 72 in.) Signed 'WOOL 2003 UNTITLED (P415)' on the reverse and overlap.
Provenance Sprueth Magers Lee, London Gisela Capitain, Cologne Private Collection Private Collection Exhibited Cologne, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Christopher Wool 12 September - 25 October 2003 Catalogue Essay 'Painting is a visual medium, there to be looked at. For me, like listening to music, it’s an emotional experience.’ - CHRISTOPHER WOOL 2003 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 lies the mastery of Christopher Wool’s work: his relentless pursuit of his chosen medium 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 him, the physical act of painting and its resulting spontaneity have carefully mapped limits; he creates rules and boundaries within his method and process. Amongst the chaos of his tempestuous and hazy strokes, Wool carefully structures his approach to medium and subject. The resulting work is visually arresting, almost alarming, while retaining a delicate and intricate quality. Decisive and yet undefined, coherent yet frantic, Christopher Wool’s Untitled confronts us in the artist’s signature style. Swathes of untamed grey course over its surface: initially, we are perhaps struck with how Wool has visualized destruction — the marks seem to reflect the moment where the artist is tearing something up, washing it over, and starting again. Questions loom. What are we witnessing here? Should we be looking at this? However, 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.’ (Jerry Saltz, ‘Hard Attack,’ The Village Voice, November 2004). In the instance of Untitled, Wool expands the limits of painting through a nuanced and subtle appropriation of the graffiti he found on the streets of 1970s New York. The artist took photos of the street art that intrigued him, contributing to the genesis for works like the present lot. For Wool, the process of painting is inherently reductive. One discovers that ‘each new set of lines is smothered in hazy veils of wiped grey, with further layers sprayed on top, to the point where distinguishing between the various imbrications becomes impossible. The antiheroic notion of mark-unmaking correlates with a conviction lying at the heart of Wool's oeuvre — that linear progress toward artistic mastery is a modernist relic.’ (K. Brinson, ‘Trouble is My Business,’ Christopher Wool exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2014, p.47). By abandoning a notion of ‘linear progress,’ Wool operates in a realm where erasure and creation become synonymous. Deletion allows him to document emotions of angst, indecision and uncertainty, which ultimately read as poetic. In its innate spontaneity and its draw to the order in disorder, Wool’s work invites parallels with the primal touch of the Abstract Expressionists. Paintings like Untitled are deeply rooted in the heritage of Post-War abstraction as well as the gritty vernacular of street culture, celebrating and expanding painting’s potential. Employing silkscreen, a favourite tool of his since the 1990s, Wool’s sub-layer painting is an elegant transformation of text into image; he takes the vernacular of street ‘tagging’ and removes the guise of linguistic order, abstracting the textual forms while keeping them