Beschreibung:

Christopher Wool Hole in Your Fuckin Head (W31) 1992 Enamel on aluminum. 108 x 72 in. (274.3 x 182.9 cm). Signed, titled and dated “Fuckin Head (W31) Wool 1992” on the reverse.
Provenance Luhring Augustine, New York Literature J. Avgikos, “Christopher Wool – Luhring Augustine, New York, New York”, ArtForum, January 1993 Catalogue Essay The present lot, Hole in your Fuckin Head, belongs to Christopher Wool’s famous large-scale series of “word” paintings, painted in 1992. In his paintings and above all in this lot, Wool addresses the universal experience; they interrogate and humor us, challenging our expectations of the traditional norm. His artwork has followed a trajectory that is at once historically reflexive, witness to the moments around it, yet simultaneously acutely self-critical. He operates in mediums that challenge our perception of composition, questioning the meanings behind layered meanings and subconscious references. Wool sought out inspiration in new possibilities of painting in the early 1980s. By creating contradictions to the traditional associations of the brushstroke and colors widely accepted in the painterly dictionary, the artist considered his artistic influences and developed his own way. Wool considered his mature work to have started in 1984 when he began to focus and investigate the basic process of painting. Over the coming years his stylistic tastes changed and developed. By 1987, Wool began to incorporate words as the subjects of his paintings. Initially these works included only stenciled monosyllabic phrases “sex” and “luv” over one another. His first word painting was a play on the words “Trojan Horse”, by dropping the “a” in Trojan and the “e” in Horse he focuses on the multiple meanings or expressions produced by abbreviating and deleting letters. (A. Goldstein, “What They’re Not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool”, Christopher Wool California, 1998, p. 260) Madeleine Grynsztejn explains further, “Christopher Wool’s “word” paintings “beat on the very crux of symbolic meaning, through their focus on language. That the predominant pictorial elements in these paintings are words only complicates this art’s purported intent to clearly “speak,” for inherent in any viewer’s reception is the experiential fact of reading and looking as simultaneously exclusive acts. The word as plastic material – as shape, medium, and color – will always rub against the word as syntax and conjurer of mental images. Wool deliberately choreographs a collision between different components of language – grammatical, semantic, visual, imaginary, and spoken – that conveys an emotional magnitude beyond the range of everyday speech and closer in spirit to the true proportions of Wool’s subject; the inherent inefficacy and near-constant failure of language. These paintings may contain words – the building blocks by which we identify, analyze, and enunciate – but instead of information, we are given a physical record of disarticulation.” (M. Grynsztejn taken from "Unfinished Business" in A. Goldstein, Christopher Wool Los Angeles, 1999, p. 267) The real impact of Wool’s incorporation of text into his “word” paintings lies within his manipulation of a pre-contextualized medium into the composition of painting itself. We can see that the roller paintings he created lend themselves to his current adaptation in the present lot; layering on meaning-- text onto canvas is simply another mode for the artist to display multiple subjects in his artwork. In 1988 Christopher Wool endeavored into yet another technique of application. The artist chose to work with rubber stamps, which crossed his canvases in myriad fashions. Linked to his roller paintings, this series also finds new interpretations of the artist’s application of method upon canvas. In the stamp series Wool broadens the imagery to incorporate leaves, birds, flowers and other tactile visuals. Like the rollers and stamp series which decorate the canvas, the “word” paintings operate in layered meanings. Wool uses text as a vehicle for address, much the same way as other artists like Jean-Michel-Basquiat or Vito Acconci One is practically conditio