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Christopher Wool (born 1955) is an American artist.Christopher Wool: CV on i1.exhibit-e.com Since the 1980s, Wool's art has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas.
At 303 Gallery in 1988, Wool and fellow artist Robert Gober presented a collaborative exhibition and installation which included Wool's seminal text-based painting, Apocalypse Now (1988). The work features words from a famous line in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness.Judd Tully (October 11, 2013), Christopher Wool's "Apocalypse Now" to Hit Christie's Sales Floor Artinfo. From the early 1990s through the present, the silkscreen has been a primary tool in Wool's practice. Guggenheim Museum Presents Major Survey of American Artist Christopher Wool , Opening October 25 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In his abstract art paintings Wool brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, casual impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces.
Writing in 2000, in The New York Times, Ken Johnson highlighted Wool's response to an observation made on the street as significant, "in the 1980s, Christopher Wool was doing a Neo-Pop sort of painting using commercial rollers to apply decorative patterns to white panels. One day he saw a new white truck violated by the spray-painted words 'sex' and 'luv.' Mr. Wool made his own painting using those words and went on to make paintings with big, black stenciled letters saying things like 'Run Dog Run' or 'Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids.' The paintings captured the scary, euphoric mood of a high-flying period not unlike our own."Ken Johnson, " Art in Review: Christopher Wool," The New York Times, March 17, 2000.
Although Wool is best known as a painter, he has amassed a large body of black-and-white photographs taken at night in the streets between the Lower East Side and Chinatown. Originally begun in the mid-1990s, the project was resumed and completed in 2002. East Broadway Breakdown, a book reproducing all 160 photographs, was issued by Holzwarth Publications in 2004. William Gedney — Christopher Wool: Into the Night, June 27 – October 3, 2004 MoMA PS1, New York.
In 2012, Wool contributed the set design for Moving Parts, a piece conceived by Benjamin Millepied's L.A. Dance Project.Laura Bleiberg (November 21, 2011), Benjamin Millepied and Music Center announce L.A. Dance Project Los Angeles Times.
Wool's Word paintings made between the late 1980s and early 2000s are his most sought-after pieces on the art market; as of 2013, seven "word" works feature in Wool's top ten auction sales.Gareth Harris (September 20, 2013), Why the rise of Christopher Wool? The Art Newspaper. At Christie's London in February 2012, Untitled (1990), a later word painting bearing the broken word FOOL, sold for £4.9 million ($7.7 million). In November 2013, art dealer Christophe van de Weghe bought Apocalypse Now (1988) for $26.4 million on behalf of a client at Christie's New York.Carol Vogel (November 12, 2013), At $142.4 Million, Triptych Is the Most Expensive Artwork Ever Sold at an Auction The New York Times. Wool's monumental black and white word painting Riot (1990) sold for $29.9 million at Sotheby's New York in 2015.Scott Reyburn (May 13, 2015), A Rothko Tops Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Auction The New York Times. That same month, Untitled (1990), made with alkyd and graphite on paper and featuring the words 'RUN DOG EAT DOG RUN', realized $2.4 million, the record for a work on paper by the artist. Christopher Wool, Untitled (1990) Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 13 May 2015, New York.
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