拍品 48

Christopher Wool came of age artistically in the early 1980s, returning to painting in 1981 after a self-imposed two-year hiatus. This return coincided with a critical moment in painting's recent history. After a decade of avant-garde experimentation in and exploration of new genres such as performance and video, the Neo-Expressionists boisterously reasserted painting's continuing vitality, thrusting the art world into heated debate about the medium's viability as a critical artistic tool. Suspicious of the quick rise and enthusiastic embrace of these artists by the conservative art market, critics like Douglas Crimp saw a return to painting as inherently retrograde, arguing that the medium had run its course by the end of the 1960s. Toeing the line between these two extreme positions were artists like Wool who remained committed to painting despite the expressed doubts about its future, embarking on a self-reflexive and critical examination of the medium, from within the medium itself. For Wool, this doubt was "not a negative principle but an intrinsic and fundamental agent in the creation of the work--doubt, that is, not hopelessness; skepticism, not outright abandonment." Over the last two decades Wool has explored and expanded the limits and possibilities of painting, deploying various strategies of appropriation and employing techniques, processes, images and language drawn from popular and vernacular culture. The myriad lessons about painting learned through the Twentieth century resonate in his complex and multivalent works. While his all-over compositions and shallow pictorial fields are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, his use of commercially available patterned rollers, rubber stamps, stencils, silk-screens, and spray guns, and mundane everyday imagery, strategies borrowed from Pop, expunge the aura of the spontaneous, expressive brushstroke and the existential transcendence it suggests. His limited palette, emphasis on material, and repetition of a fixed set of standardized images, all suggest a significant debt to Minimalism. And while his famous text paintings, begun in 1987, suggest a relation to Conceptual art's reliance on the linguistic, his clever manipulation of scale, spelling and syntax transforms words from legible text into pure image. In the absence of compelling imagery, Wool has focused his formal and compositional experiments on the process of painting and the material properties of paint. Created by layering different types of imagery and image-making techniques, Wool's complex compositions simultaneously reveal their construction and deconstruction registering the process of their creation in the work's final form. The black sprayed whirls, poured and dripped paint and silk-screened raster pattern that make up Untitled (P 360) are all clearly discernible in the final image. Partially obscuring these intricate image layers are a series of broad flat strokes of white paint, which reinforce the flat ground of the picture plane and seem to emphasize the importance of negative space for a painting's composition. In this and other recent works Wool has explored a new form of mark making that creates through a process of erasure or removal. Wool's erasures are all about painting, and hence, distinct from Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953), a neo-Dada provocation that challenged the traditional authority of the genius artist and autonomy of the artwork. In Untitled (P 448), the base image is completely dissolved; the repressed gestural mark of traditional painting reasserts itself but through its negative. The processes of painting are expanded to include both additive and subtractive mark making.

CHRISTOPHER WOOL (b. 1955)

Untitled (P448)

細節

CHRISTOPHER WOOL (b. 1955)
Untitled (P448)
signed, titled and dated 'WOOL 2004 (P448)' (on the overlap)
enamel on canvas mounted on board
96 x 72 in. (243.8 x 182.9 cm.)
Painted in 2004.

來源

Lurhing Augustine, New York
Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp

展覽

Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Private View 1980-2000: Collection Pierre Huber, June-September 2005, p. 82 (illustrated).