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Lot Essay
"Nearly all of Wool's painting - be they composed of letter and words, or the palimpsests of other mark-making activities - telegraph some ... message of disenfranchisement. Dispense with hierarchy, dispense with composition and colour, dispense with pictorial order, they seem to say. Yet, paradoxically, from this confrontation with painting's supposed civility, Wool makes an elegant and formidable case for it being alive and well.
"Since the late 1970s, Christopher Wool has re-addressed and expanded the process of painting. In 9th Street Run Down he creates a complex fiction out of forty-four large works on paper all made over the past year. Wool started these 'painted silkscreens' as studio sketches after his retrospective exhibits in Los Angeles, Basel, Pittsburgh and Geneva. It was immediately clear that they would become an outstanding grouping of works embodying a special narrative that is very much a part of Wool's work.
"To spend time amongst [Wool's] art is something akin to being caught in the compulsive and circular absurdity of a Beckett play. The characters within a painting state their case with a simple and irrefutable logic. 'A painting of a painting is still a painting', Wool insists. And yet like Beckett's Godot, its importance, let alone its existence, may well be something that can never be quite confirmed. Wool offers no reassurances to the contrary. But in his own tireless vigil he brings to the activity particular and extraordinary worth. In 9th Street Run Down the reader becomes part of the play on stage" (Neville Wakefield, quoted on www.steidl.com.).
"Since the late 1970s, Christopher Wool has re-addressed and expanded the process of painting. In 9th Street Run Down he creates a complex fiction out of forty-four large works on paper all made over the past year. Wool started these 'painted silkscreens' as studio sketches after his retrospective exhibits in Los Angeles, Basel, Pittsburgh and Geneva. It was immediately clear that they would become an outstanding grouping of works embodying a special narrative that is very much a part of Wool's work.
"To spend time amongst [Wool's] art is something akin to being caught in the compulsive and circular absurdity of a Beckett play. The characters within a painting state their case with a simple and irrefutable logic. 'A painting of a painting is still a painting', Wool insists. And yet like Beckett's Godot, its importance, let alone its existence, may well be something that can never be quite confirmed. Wool offers no reassurances to the contrary. But in his own tireless vigil he brings to the activity particular and extraordinary worth. In 9th Street Run Down the reader becomes part of the play on stage" (Neville Wakefield, quoted on www.steidl.com.).