Luhring Augustine, New York
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are four artist pinholes in all four corners of the sheet. The left and right edges of the sheet are deckled. There is a slight undulation throughout the sheet which is hinged verso to the matte intermittently around the edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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“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)

Sinuous and lyrical, Christopher Wool’s works from the late nineties onward represent the third major phase of his output. Although they constitute a major break from what had come before, they also show the artist mining his own oeuvre, drawing upon everything he learned in those formative years to create something altogether new. Smudged, drooping lines with dark tendrils impinging upon the ghostly grays and whites of the anterior plane; Untitled mesmerizes and transfixes. And yet, as several of Wool’s critics have observed, “these paintings refuse to behave like paintings” (Eric Banks, “Propositions in Paint,” in Wool, Taschen, 2008, p. 370). With the clarity of photographs, they look more like pictures of paintings than paintings themselves, despite the medium and the style forcing the viewer to acknowledge🥂 the bodily energy and effor⛄t that went into creating them.

Of course, this refusal to conform to the narrow strꦬictures of painting is only appropriate given Wool’s career and character. Without wishing to sink too deeply into the platitudes surrounding Wool’s connection to the New York punk scene in the 1970s and 80s, a definite anarcho-cool vibe has run throughout Wool’s oeuvre. From the dry wit of his word paintings, through the disordered precision of🔯 his patterns to the provocative beauty of the present work, Wool has simultaneously breathed new life into painting and questioned its role in society and art.

Indeed, when Wool entered the art world, painting was under heavy fire. Douglas Crimp had just relegated it to a “cul-de-sac of rococo irrelevance” (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Christopher Wool, 2013, p. 37) in his essay “The End of Painting,” and the general consensus was that as a medium, painting was passé and redundant. Rather than decrying its merits, Wool’s response was to take the discipline in an entirely new, completely unforeseen direction, challenging his audience’s assumptions regarding painting. In the case of Untitled, silkscreen ink, a medium associated with prints and multiples, is harnessed in opposition to its traditional roleဣ to create a unique work.

Eric Banks describes Wool’s paintings as requoting themselves, getting painted “again and again… in ventriloquized subsequent appearances” (ibid., p. 371). Untitled duly builds upon a web of textured painterly marks drawn from Wool’s previous work with꧂ bold loops reminiscent of meaningless, aggressive graffiti. The minute details of the ink’s movement outside the artist’s remit – intrepid squiggles of darkness into the ghostly white beyond – compound the overall effect. Defying categorization, Wool vacillates between concreteness and abstraction, settling on neither and thus forging his own path forward, taking painting with him.