Untitled

Christopher Wool’s Untitled (2014) is a rare, monumental exemplar from his important series of jumbled letters and symbols strewn on canvas. Created just after the artist’s celebrated New York retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, the work clarifies the elements which have come to be the most important to Wool’s practice—letters and words, black and white coloration, and the silkscreen process. This series recapitulates the artist’s oeuvre in a novel, extraordinary form. Wool here is reflecting upon his previous works, self-appropriating and reintegrating old motifs in new, revolutionary ways in order to rejuvenate his sense of artistic discovery. Untitled most significantly recalls Wool’s celebrated word paintings begun a quarter-century before. While this earlier series was notably ordered and followed ordinary semantic conventions to permit legibility, Untitled amasses a cacophony of letters of different sizes, fonts, tones, and orientations, overlaid against one another to prevent any sense of semiotic clarity. Of considerable importance to Wool’s artistic development after the Guggenheim retrospective, Untitled is the first of this rarefied series to come to auction, with similar examples held in prestigious institutional collections, including The Broad in Los Angeles and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Created with digital assistance, in Untitled Wool uses mechanical and digital replication as a means of self-appropriation, propelling old forms into new dialogues more suited for the digital era. While his earlier word paintings were created before the widespread adoption of the internet, Untitled came into being in an era of immediate digital reproduction, where text and image had become universally pervasive. The style seen in Untitled was first employed in Wool’s cover design for the 2013 Guggenheim catalogue. In Untitled, a large uppercase O is the most prominent icon in the assembly of greyscale letters and symbols, which also includes Js and Bs, a 6, an upside-down Y, and several sideways ampersands. A wrench form to the right of the canvas challenges distinctions between text and symbol. Two rectangular forms attempt in vain to frame the composition, instead becoming an underlayer upon which Wool adds more and more forms. Meandering, freeform lines weave across the canvas, echoing the organic forms of the artist’s contemporaneous wire and metal sculptures and linear etchings. Untitled is a palimpsest of Wool’s artistic practice, excavating then reburying myriad motifs from the artist’s past across the almost nine by eight-foot canvas. The present work is a masterful example of Wool’s broader creative enterprise, eloquently described by Consuelo Císcar Casabán: “Wool likes to work with black and white, the color of the newspapers that seize control of his retina every morning as he breakfasts with the reality that he tries to demythologize with brushstrokes, ever ready to shatter everyday symbols and stereotypes and convert them into other truths, other realities, which communicate just as much or more” (C. C. Casabán, “Meanings,” in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 2006, p. 197).

The artist stated of his practice: “I define myself in my work by reducing the things I don’t want—it seems impossible to know when to say ‘yes,’ but I know what I can say ‘no’ to” (C. Wool, quoted in D. Rimanelli, “Exit East on Broadway,” in op. cit., p. 205). Untitled presents Wool’s practice in its most considered and reduced form, reintegrating disparate earlier works into a cohesive composition, succinctly communicating his enduring message, critiquing contemporary culture and challenging conventional notions of text and meaning. Having earlier worked within the historical tradition exploring the pictorial possibilities of language, here Wool offers a decisive break, projecting his earlier work as shattered fragments of texts bound together in an undecipherable, wooly thicket of symbols. Bringing to the fore the abstracted tendencies latent in his previous work, Wool creates a vivid work replete with a potent visual presence and abounding in aesthetic subtleties. The innovations advanced in Untitled demonstrate unequivocally why “Christopher Wool’s work must be considered one of the most radical, innovative and therefore important reflections of pictorial thinking of the present time” (M. Paz, “Christopher Wool,” in op. cit., p. 200).