Christopher Wool | |
---|---|
Born | Chicago, US | September 16, 1955
Movement | Abstract Art |
Partner | Charline von Heyl |
Awards | Wolfgang Hahn Prize, amfAR's Award |
Website | https://wool735.com |
Christopher Wool (born 1955) is an American artist. [1] Since the 1980s, Wool's art has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas.
Wool was born in Chicago, Illinois to Glorye and Ira Wool, a molecular biologist and a psychiatrist. [2] He grew up in Chicago. [3] In 1973, he moved to New York City and enrolled in Studio School studies with Jack Tworkov and Harry Krame. [2] After a short period of formal training as a painter at the New York Studio School, he dropped out and immersed himself in the world of underground film and music. [4] Between 1980 and 1984, he worked as part-time studio assistant to Joel Shapiro. [5]
Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases. [6] Wool began to create word paintings in the late 1980s, reportedly after having seen graffiti on a brand new white truck. Using a system of alliteration, with the words often broken up by a grid system, or with the vowels removed (as in 'TRBL' or 'DRNK'), Wool's word paintings often demand reading aloud to make sense. [4]
At 303 Gallery in 1988, Wool and fellow artist Robert Gober presented a collaborative exhibition and installation which included Wool's seminal text-based painting, Apocalypse Now (1988). The work features words from a famous line in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now , based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness. [7] From the early 1990s through the present, the silkscreen has been a primary tool in Wool's practice. [8] In his abstract paintings Wool brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, casual impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces.
Writing in 2000, in The New York Times , Ken Johnson highlighted Wool's response to an observation made on the street as significant, "in the 1980s, Christopher Wool was doing a Neo-Pop sort of painting using commercial rollers to apply decorative patterns to white panels. One day he saw a new white truck violated by the spray-painted words 'sex' and 'luv.' Mr. Wool made his own painting using those words and went on to make paintings with big, black stenciled letters saying things like 'Run Dog Run' or 'Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids.' The paintings captured the scary, euphoric mood of a high-flying period not unlike our own." [9]
Although Wool is best known as a painter, he has amassed a large body of black-and-white photographs taken at night in the streets between the Lower East Side and Chinatown. Originally begun in the mid-1990s, the project was resumed and completed in 2002. East Broadway Breakdown, a book reproducing all 160 photographs, was issued by Holzwarth Publications in 2004. [10]
In 2012, Wool contributed the set design for Moving Parts, a piece conceived by Benjamin Millepied's L.A. Dance Project. [11]
In 1998, a retrospective of Wool's work was mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an exhibition which then traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. In 2009 he had an exhibition at the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany and in 2012 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. From October 25, 2013 to January 22, 2014, a retrospective of Wool's work was exhibited at The Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2014. [12]
Wool has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1989), served as a DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence (1992), and received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize. [13] In 2010, he was honored with amfAR's Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS. [5]
In 2006, he had a solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. [6]
Wool's Word paintings made between the late 1980s and early 2000s are the most sought-after pieces on the art market; as of 2013, seven "word" works feature in Wool's top ten auction sales. [14] At Christie's London in February 2012, Untitled (1990), a later word painting bearing the broken word FOOL, sold for £4.9 million ($7.7 million). [7] In November 2013, art dealer Christophe van de Weghe bought Apocalypse Now (1988) for $26.4 million on behalf of a client at Christie's New York. [15] Wool's monumental black and white word painting Riot (1990) sold for $29.9 million at Sotheby's New York in 2015. [16] That same month, Untitled (1990), made with alkyd and graphite on paper and featuring the words 'RUN DOG EAT DOG RUN', realized $2.4 million, the record for a work on paper by the artist. [17]
He lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas, together with his wife and fellow painter Charline von Heyl. [2] [18]
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was primarily a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who makes large-scale, cinematic, psychologically-charged prints of staged scenes set in suburban landscapes and interiors. He directs a large production and lighting crew to construct his images.
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" (1964). Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities."
On Kawara was a Japanese conceptual artist who lived in SoHo, New York City, from 1965. He took part in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.
Michael Heizer is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was an American painter, sculptor and photographer.
Martin Kippenberger was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.
Lucio Fontana was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He's known as the founder of Spatialism and exponent of abstract painting as the first known artist to slash his canvases - which symbolizes an utter rejection of all prerequisites of art.
Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. was an American artist generally described as minimalist, although his work has roots in abstract expressionism, color field painting. and lyrical abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.
Albert Oehlen is a German painter, installation artist and musician. He lives and works in Bühler, Switzerland and Segovia, Spain.
Mark Grotjahn is an American painter best known for abstract work and bold geometric paintings. Grotjahn lives and works in Los Angeles.
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, also known as V. S. Gaitonde, was regarded as one of India's foremost abstract painters. He received the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1971.
Joe Bradley is an American visual artist, known for his minimalist and color field paintings. He is also the former lead singer of the punk band Cheeseburger. Bradley has been based in New York City and Amagansett.
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
Wade Guyton is an American post-conceptual artist who among other things makes digital paintings on canvas using scanners and digital inkjet technology.
Elaine Dannheisser was an avid contemporary art collector and driving force behind the Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Art Collection. She was a onetime trustee of the Guggenheim Museum. Following an exhibition of her collection in 1997-98, she donated the largest ever cache of contemporary art to the Museum of Modern Art.
Apocalypse Now is a 1988 painting by the American artist Christopher Wool, widely regarded as among the most important of his "word paintings" created in the late 1980s. It consists of the words "SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS", stenciled in black, block letters in alkyd enamel on an off-white painted aluminum and steel plate measuring 84 x 72 inches. The quotation is from the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie Apocalypse Now, where it is written in a letter mailed home by a character who has lost his mind in the jungle.
La Hara is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1981. The artwork, which depicts a skeletal police officer, sold for $35 million at Christie's in May 2017.