Christopher Wool
1955–
When Christopher Wool began his painting career in the early 1980s, the field was in a moment of crisis. As a powerful faction of artists and thinkers refuted painting’s relevance, demanding a more self-conscious approach to images and representation, Wool responded by critiquing the medium from within, exploring the mechanics of its processes. Often drawing inspiration from hardware stores rather than art shops, Wool has employed a range of devices in the service of painting, from rubber stamps and stencils to screens and spray paint, working principally with black enamel on chalky white aluminum panels. As he later reflected, he became “more interested in ‘how to paint it’ than ‘what to paint.’”
Untitled belongs to Wool’s groundbreaking series known as the “word paintings,” begun in 1987. These hand-stenciled works—which followed “pattern paintings” made with incised decorative rollers and “drip paintings” that exploited the physical properties of paint—showcase single words or found texts as sequences of letters, spaced in gridlike formation across the white ground. Here, the declarative RUN DOG RUN DOG RUN, a play on the simple repetitions of classic Dick and Jane books, becomes a compositional exercise. As bold block letters run in nonstop, breathless progression, they are transformed into incomprehensible utterances. Their linguistic integrity broken, the words read as images. While the use of stencil suggests precision and uniformity, imperfections abound, as black paint leaks into white ground and white “touch-ups” roll into black. This tension between perfunctory process and human touch highlights a central paradox of Wool’s practice: a negotiation between an aesthetic of calculation and one of immediacy.
Introduction
Christopher Wool (born 1955) is an American artist. Since the 1980s, Wool's art has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas.
Wikidata identifier
Q1087064
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 22, 2025.
Introduction
Wool attended both Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and The New York Studio School. His paintings typically feature stamped, stenciled, or screenprinted images of decorative patterns or words, though later works are made with a variety of gestures and media, including spray paint, to create mostly monochromatic abstract imagery. He has exhibited extensively internationally and was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim, NY, in 2013.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter, photographer
ULAN identifier
500118710
Names
Christopher Wool
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 22, 2025.
