ART CITIES: London-Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool was born in 1955, grew up in Chicago, and moved to New York City in the early 1970s. Since establishing himself as an artist in the 1980s, Wool has forged an agile, highly focused practice that incorporates a variety of processes and mediums, paying special attention to the complexities of painting. Wool’s creative output also incorporates photography, sculpture, artist books, and printmaking.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Featuring over fifty works on paper, sculptures, and prints from the most recent period of his career, this exhibition  is the most expansive presentation of Christopher Wool Wool’s work in London for many years and his third with the gallery. As in his latest self-staged exhibitions—last year in New York and this year in Marfa, Texas—the London exhibition highlights the essential interconnectivity of the artist’s practices, in which he continues to engage with the limits of abstraction. For Wool, process and subject go hand in hand. The range of processes employed in each of Wool’s multilayered works on paper reveals the extraordinary breadth of his artistic strategies. He began to silkscreen his own works in the 1990s, flattening an image and applying it to canvas before adding gestures of paint. This approach has become more complex over time, as the artist explores the effects of repetition, scale, rhythm, and different means of overpainting, such as the looping line of an industrial spray gun. Further to these expressive marks of paint, Wool drags turpentine-soaked rags over the painted surface to efface his images in a haze of gray mist. In contrast to the monochrome palette he is often associated with, at Gagosian Wool imbues various works with pastel hues. By erasing, collaging, overpainting, and digitally modifying imagery from previous works, he creates something vitally new through a process of self-replication. The cursive line of Wool’s sculptures—shown initially in his landmark survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in 2013–14—echoes the gestural marks of his paintings. Four intimate and two large-scale sculptures in copper-plated steel and bronze are on view here. Their genesis lies in the arid landscape of Texas, where Wool divides his time between Marfa and New York. Wool collected pieces of old fencing and hay-baling wire for years before realizing their sculptural potential. At times these remain as found, and at others they are transformed into new forms and reimagined on a dramatic scale. Wool purposefully leaves details of the processes visible, such as welded joints, to stress the handmade quality of his works. Two series of etchings from 2021 and 2023 also form part of the exhibition. The latter, “Defenestration Suite”, was made to illustrate “What Just Happened” (2023), a book of poetry by Richard Hell—a writer, musician, and longtime collaborator of Wool’s. Reminiscent of Wool’s iconic word paintings, letters and words are entangled with lines in these prints to test the meaning and visual resonance of language.

Photo: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018, Enamel, oil, and silkscreen on paper, 44 x 30 inches (111.8 x 76.2 cm), © Christopher Wool, Photo: Tim Nighswander, Courtesy the artist

Info: Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 13/10-19/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/