In 2001, I curated an exhibition¹ that related Christopher Wool’s work to his images. The exhibition linked a collection of silkscreen-only work with images of Manhattan’s Decrease East Facet, beforehand reproduced within the East Broadway Breakdown ebook,² and a collection of studio Polaroids he used to judge his in-progress work. Exhibiting them facet by facet not solely highlighted the reproductive course of on the core of Wool’s observe, nevertheless it additionally revealed how his abstraction was located within the house and time he inhabited. Twenty years later, a brand new collection of books, devoted to images taken in West Texas the place Wool now spends a part of his time, was the place to begin of an exhibition that passed off in Brussels in 2022 and in the end grew to become SEESTOPRUN, the 2024 undertaking at 101 Greenwich.

Highway, Swamp, Yard, and Westtexaspsychosculpture are 4 collection of images, gathered in 4 books.³ Highway and Westtexaspsychosculpture are simple black-and-white pictures of the panorama round Marfa. Highway is a collection of empty dust roads, bushes, and skies in fastidiously hued grays. Westtexaspsychosculpture exhibits scraps of metallic, tires, tarpaulins, and different on a regular basis junk. The aridity and monotony of the West Texas panorama have seeped into Wool’s work because the grit and power of the streets of NYC did within the ’90s.

Wool’s images should not supply pictures for his work, works on paper, or sculptures, however they present us what he appears at and, extra importantly, how he appears at it. His gaze focuses on the dry, the dust, the mess, the glitch, the repetition, to not denounce or capitalize on their abjection however to embrace them as liberating and generative instruments. By trying on the disregarded with care and a focus, Wool opens an unseen world that turns into a territory for each formal and existential expression. His early phrase work are characterised by their use of derogatory phrases (FOOL, AMOK, TRBL, and many others.) and much more so within the Black Guide, composed of twenty-two nine-letter phrases equivalent to HYPOCRITE, PSYCHOTIC, and EXTREMIST. Nevertheless, it’s the subsequent patterns and summary work that may come to engender Wool’s painterly language. With their managed play on erasure, indecision, obliteration, and cover- up, they gave rise to a painter who claims failure and constraint as his personal. Deconstructing the artist as hero and as ego, Wool turns into a catalyst for his panorama of dilapidated streets, stray canine, oil stains, graffiti, his personal burned-down studio,⁴ and desert paths.

The start line of SEESTOPRUN was a need to flee the neutrality of up to date artwork areas, galleries, and establishments and to search for a spot in NYC that may permit Wool’s work to work together with one thing aside from a clean slate. Wool traces again his consciousness of the bodily interaction between works and surroundings to his time in Texas.

Westtexaspsychosculpture is the primary manifestation of how Marfa in the end led Wool to sculpture. If his photographic assemblage of a junkyard’s unintentional sculptures turns Wool in the direction of the three-dimensional, it’s his gathering of bits and items of wire throughout his walks in Marfa that open a course of to actualize it. These small wire sculptures⁵ are the origin of all his latest forged sculptures. Their similarity to the traces of his drawings at first amused him, earlier than he realized that these flattened items of wire might be reconfigured into fashions for a lot bigger works. He grew to become concerned with how they interacted with the house of his studio. He wished to create sculptures that engaged with their settings, versus what he calls modernist “plop” sculptures. For the forged sculptures, scale grew to become the subsequent query, as blowing up a really small object can typically result in a lack of definition. By working digitally, Wool discovered a solution to keep away from shedding the main points of the wire sculptures by enlargement and, by revealing all of the welds within the forged sculptures, to render seen the method of assembly. Wool says: “To me it’s quite a bit like taking a look at a silkscreen portray the place you possibly can see it’s handmade, nevertheless it’s a mechanical hand.” In his hanging wire sculptures, which aren’t forged, the rust and barbs give them a menacing side, whereas their floating twists and turns evoke the traces present in a few of Wool’s work and works on paper.

The works on paper are a part of a number of collection that, just like the pictures, are every linked to a ebook, each in origin and in vacation spot. They’re a fancy layering of silkscreen, printed pages, and paint. For example, one group is painted on prime of a silkscreen on paper—the unique silkscreen coming from a collection of enormous work based mostly on a small Rorschach work Wool made within the ’80s. These are printed in a ebook (ebook 3), the pages of which Wool will reprint in a forthcoming ebook (ebook 5). One other group, composed of six works, is painted on prime of an outdated silkscreen print from the late ’90s that Wool had left unfinished. On the time, he had determined to attract on prime of the silkscreens with a magic marker, then scan them. That was the primary time Wool scanned an present work. Twenty years later, he painted on the silkscreens and printed them as a collection in one other ebook (ebook 4). Digital manipulation of pictures has change into more and more central to Wool’s creative course of. Images was on the coronary heart of his early silkscreen works, permitting replica and layering but additionally introducing a mechanical distance from the gesture; with digital instruments, Wool can use his personal work as supply materials, creating complicated circulation between pictures and scales.

The origin of the work on this exhibition might be traced again to Wool’s works on paper. A small piece of a monotype, a print, or a drawing is enlarged, silkscreened, doubled, or turned the other way up; the molecular turns into monumental, a element turns into a panorama.

The mosaic on this exhibition can be based mostly on such a drawing. Wool was not too long ago commissioned by Brookfield Properties to create a piece for his or her new Manhattan West improvement.⁶ He used the size of the undertaking to experiment with one more strategy of mechanical translation, this time in a hand-crafted stone-and-glass mosaic. The mosaic in SEESTOPRUN is a smaller model of the one put in on Ninth Avenue. Initially to be put in in Marfa, it was in the end an ideal match at 101 Greenwich. If the silkscreen course of used for the work tends to blur the definition of the unique picture, the small tiles of glass and stone utilized in mosaic permit for every of its inflection to come back alive.

In Wool’s personal phrases: “Every work within the exhibition is initiated in some sense by a replica of a earlier work.”

SEESTOPRUN takes place in a post-COVID New York, with its empty storefronts and vacant workplace areas. It’s positioned in such an area: excessive up, uncooked, located, permeated by the town, its historical past, and its material. It takes place as an unmediated expertise, exterior market and institutional guidelines. It takes place on the intersection of a number of connections: those who hyperlink the artist with what surrounds him, those who join the works themselves, and those who come up between the work and its viewers.

—Anne Pontégnie

Curated by
Anne Pontégnie

at 101 Greenwich St, New York
till Juley 28, 2024