 |
| Christopher Wool @ Gagosian Installation |
The works in this exhibition - many paintings on paper - were quite different from what I associate with Christopher Wool's art. Known for his stencils, screen prints and spray paint, I think of Wool's post-pop conceptual paintings as fast, flat, and without surface texture. By contrast, the small works on display in this latest London exhibition were filled with dense, thick paint in gestural sweeps, curves, and coils. Similarly, in the works exhibited here, Wool ventures beyond his familiar black and white into pink, ochre, grey and sandy. The lyricism and poetry of thick brushstrokes over silkscreen, spraypaint, and stencils make the works closer to expressionism than to pop or conceptual. Indeed, at moments they reminded me more of Philip Guston's early expressionist works and at other times verging into impasto with their thick build up of paint on a fragile surface.
 |
| Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018 |
Most of these paintings are reworkings, rewritings, modifications of Wool's earlier works. He takes old editions and in a process of erasure, addition, digital modification, creates entirely new works that are also deep with self-referentiality and self-replication. As if to announce his need to rethink, repeat and simultaneously erase, or make something entirely new of what already exists, Wool has crossed out earlier signatures and dates on the prints and re-inscribed with new date and signature. Such recycling is both like a dance that circles back on an earlier work, and a starting again, revealing obsessions and an announcement that "this is how I have developed as an artist."
 |
| Christopher Wool @ Gagosian Installation |
There is also a noticeable theme of doubling, mirrors, repetition and copying being explored in the works on exhibition. Works such as a series of Untitled black oil and inkjets on paper from 2022 explore two halves of the same, though the shapes differ. It is as Wool has folded the print in the middle and pressed the paint across the fold. In other works in which different modes of paint application layer the paper, the lines between two halves are sketchier, but nevertheless visibler. At still other times, coils and curls are painted over the two halves of a page as if to create a shadow between one and the other, though it's not clear which is the object and which the shadow. In a further repetition, the winding, twisting coils of industrial materials made into sculptures can be seen as mirroring the paintings on the wall.
 |
| Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2021 |
As mentioned, also on display at Grosvenor Hill are Wool's winding and coiling sculptures. Coils and loops and twists and turns echoing those made with spray guns underneath paint on the paintings are realized in three dimensions and placed on the gallery floor. The sculptures are fashioned out of found copper-plated steel and bronze. The twists, turns, and knots made me think of the confusion of my mind, moving in multiple different directions, following different rhythms and coming together in a poetic ambiguity. Sitting somewhere between industrially produced and hand made (with welding and obviously shaped), the sculptures are an enigma. But, their communication with the repainted monotypes gives them a sense of a whole they might not have on their own.
As the press release for the exhibition put it so nicely, Wool is an artist pushing at the edges of abstraction. What wasn't mentioned, however, is his fascination with industrial materials, fabrication, waste, and all the processes between manufacture and demolition that have become so familiar in the twentieth century. I managed to see the Christopher Wool exhibition on its final day, and I am only sorry that I didn't go earlier and get the word out so that more people could have enjoyed it.
