At once gesturally charged and aesthetically elusive, Christopher Wool's Untitled is a commanding example from the artist's corpus of abstract monochrome works. Executed in 2000, the present work juxtaposes a chaotic entropy with the austerity of the palette, perfectly encapsulating Wool’s anarchic painterly enterprise. In every way exemplary of Wool’s specialized approach to painting, Wool’s autographic black stamped patterns dance across the stark white surface of the present work, creating a swirl of layered forms that project an aura at once fully resolved and utterly dynamic. Vigorous gestures of spray-painted abstraction coalesce with stark artifacts of mechanical reproduction in Wool’s signature monochrome, imbuing the work with a characteristic refinement. Coming from the collects ion of celebrated New York City artist and gallerist Tony Shafrazi, Untitled presents the viewer with a formally engaging and intellectually rigorous artistic experience that is an enduring test.mes nt to Wool’s singular contribution to twentieth and twenty first century painting.

Remarkable for its richness and extraordinary depth of composition, Untitled is a tour de force that sees Wool mine his aesthetic vocabulary, using all his most significant abstract motifs only to erase them with white paint to create a tabula rasa on which to assert the primacy of his sprayed loops. At its core, Untitled is dialectical tension between opposing forces: black and white, order and chaos, choice and accident, mechanical and gestural. Here, a jet-black labyrinth sizzles against broad swaths of milky white, while repeating dotted, checkered patterns compete against powerful spray-painted gestures, the tightly rendered forms giving way to inky drips and shadowy speckles. Wool detonates these polarities with virtuosity, harnessing their explosive energy while maintaining a near-impossible equilibrium.

By introducing a neutralizing spread of white, Wool creates a tabula rasa on which to project his distinctive spray-painted lines. Employing the use of a large spray gun and liquified enamel paint, Wool feverishly assaults the picture with a frenzy of corkscrews. Often compared to the fluid coils of Jackson Pollock, or the concentric loops of Cy Twombly, Wool’s lines remain unique to his touch, their distinctive character perhaps best described by Glenn O’Brien: “Wool’s swirling squiggles ride the canvas with fraught exhilaration. Somet.mes s his knotted lines seem loopy and comic, other t.mes s they are furious or tense.” (Glenn O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper” in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2008) Vibrating within the crisp confines of the support, the gleaming skeins of enamel spray within Untitled pulse with the emphatic vitality and raw, barely contained vigor that mark the very best of Wool’s radical painterly oeuvre.

Layer after layer, Wool ramps up the complexity of the composition by probings the depths of his own iconography; as motifs collide and overlap, individual components skip and stutter in turbulent growth. This process of creation is informed by Wool’s love of music, and the way in which Untitled sees the artist remix and sample his own oeuvre to create something altogether new speaks directly to the Jazz and Hip-Hop that inspire him. This effect, in tandem with the insistent urbanity of his work, evokes the spirit of Downtown New York in fashion analogous to Basquiat. It was at this t.mes that Wool was working with photography to create East Broadway Breakdown, his seminal series of photographs of his neighborhood in New York, and the heroism that Wool conjures with his images of the dereliction is in evidence here as well, with the sprayed line and aluminum base invoking Urban art and graffiti.

Untitled continues to maintain a forcefully discursive relationship with art history, a precedent established with Wool’s earliest abstract works. The sweeping rhythm of the present work’s dominant pattern is powerfully evocative of the ‘allover’ Abstract Expressionist paradigm of Jackson Pollock, while Wool’s insistence on a palette restricted to black and white recalls the chromatic polarity of the best of Franz Kline’s paintings. Meanwhile Wool’s approach to media, recapitulation of found imagery, and pictorial repetition forges a strong parity with Pop masterworks by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. The unity of painting and process is thus made manifest in the present work, in which the remit of expression resides in the layering, register, overprinting, and variance of the pigment application. The dots and checkered grids that multiply across the surface of Untitled recall Sigmar Polke’s off-register Rasterbilder: the traces of a mechanical printing process gone awry. As critic Joshua Decter reflected on these paintings: “Wool offers us access to a world where things are layered to the point of implosion, where iconographic elements are built up only to virtually fall apart. These recent paintings are also his most emphatically ‘painterly’ to date: the more Wool endeavors to blot out, the more complex things get.” (Joshua Decter, “Christopher Wool: Luhring Augustine Gallery,” Artforum 34, September 1995, p. 89)

Tony Shafrazi: A Moment in t.mes

An explosive masterpiece from Wool’s celebrated oeuvre, with the present work Christopher Wool secures his legacy as one of America’s most important painters. It is a work that encapsulates all the most sought-after characteristics in Wool’s abstract practice: from the concentric loops of spray paint, dripping down the canvas, to the tightly printed mechanical pattern of dots and checkers, Untitled offers a complex overlay of Wool’s iconic painterly syntax.

Artist

Christopher Wool