193 Wool

Christopher Wool
His painting spells TRBL: Christopher Wool's stark and beautiful art

Covering all work phases in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by extensive texts as well as
production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Limited to 1,000 copies, each numbered
and signed by the artist. Also available in an Art Edition, limited to 100 copies and with an original
artwork by Christopher Wool.

In-your-face, achingly simple, deceptively frank, the work of Christopher Wool is so very New York.
Though he owes a debt to abstract expressionism and pop art, he completely transcends—even
demolishes—these genres. Whether it’s a text-based painting or an abstract spray-painted piece, his
work is immediately engaging. Wool questions painting, like many other artists in his generation, but he
doesn’t provide any easy answers. “The harder you look the harder you look,” as he titled one of his
word paintings, is an excellent example of how he states the obvious whilst provoking us to think
deeper about what seems obvious.

Christopher Wool became known in the mid-1980s through allover paintings produced with rubber
rollers commonly used to simulate decorative wallpaper patterns on walls. By 1988 he had hit stride
with his dry, dead-pan word paintings (“Trbl,” “Riot,” “Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids”),
while continuing to explore the possibilities of pattern painting. Since the 1990s, he has been developing
the painterly qualities of his work, using a mostly black-and-white palette, starting from abstract lines
drawn with a spray gun or layered stock images, overpainting silkscreens on linen, wiping out images,
with a widening variety of media, a process that can involve photography, silkscreen, and, in the new
millennium, also the computer.

Exploring Wool’s work in close to 500 pages, this monograph is exhaustive in scope and depth. All
work phases are covered in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by production Polaroids and
installation photos by Wool himself. Editor Hans Werner Holzwarth has previously collaborated on
several catalogs and artist’s books with Wool. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann
Goldstein, Anne Pontégnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks make this book a great read as well as a
definitive study of the story so far.