Christopher Wool (born 1955 in Chicago, lives in New York) belongs to a generation of artists who in the early 1980s were looking for new possibilities in painting, by critically questioning the traditional implications of brush-stroke gesture, hierarchical composition or expressive colors to achieve an individual aura, as practiced by neo-expressive movements of the late 1970s and 1980s both in Europe and in America.

In his various series of paintings the artist explores reductive strategies which can be related to the style of all-over paintings of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol's silkscreen works. In order to visualize general parameters of painting, content and composition, Wool’s earlier series of all-over works use the technique of drip painting. He then produced works with floral and ornamental patterns, and from 1987 onwards, many of his black and white series include stenciled words, applied on a reflecting aluminum surface.

With a variety of metaphorical references to spoken, phonetic, poetic and everyday language, the words in these paintings emerge from a crossover of various cultural levels and fields, including music or, as in the large-format painting Untitled (P81) in The UBS Art Collection, from other areas of popular culture. Here the textual image has its origin in the expression “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”, proclaimed by the boxer Muhammad Ali. Appearing as an all-over composition of black stenciled letters on a white surface, the text from which the indefinite articles and the spaces between words have been removed, has to be deciphered by the viewer. The words become patterns and imagery, searching for a neutral formal language which at the same time has become Christopher Wool’s personal style.

Reference:

Christopher Wool, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998. Including “What They’re Not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool”, an essay by Ann Goldstein