when Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum In 2013, he held a retrospective exhibition of Christopher Wool’s paintings and photographs, and found that the artist did not create new works or ponder the exhibition models a few months ago.Instead, he lived nearby, completely away from New York Verona’s little printerItaly, Italy, spent two weeks in the press 12 hours a day to ensure that the show’s book achieved the exact feel he wanted.
“The other artists I worked with didn’t do that because of the museum’s catalog,” said show curator Catherine Brinson. “In fact, I’ve never heard of other artists doing that.”
The other day, Wool’s rambling studio in Manhattan’s East Village was half-filled with new paintings and other works for a large exhibition. Opened June 2nd at Xavier Huffkens Gallery in Brussels, Wool was keen to show off some of his new works. Many were created in the last two years during a concentrated period of pandemic isolation. But he was more excited to reveal something at the table, it wasn’t a job for the show, but in his opinion, No It’s also a work — his latest book.
The punk comical title “Bad Rabbit” is the fifth in the series. Wool deadpan black and white photo volume A project he has announced in the last five years that has begun to consume a greater share of his relentless energy. More than any other predominantly abstract artist of his generation, Wool gave his paintings ideas from his photographs and the books he made — photographs of the world around him, his own paintings. Blur photos in, other photos and all of the above, sometimes in Baroque style.
As he moved into the later stages of his famous career, he emphasized that the three efforts of photography, bookbinding and painting are inseparable in a way that is not yet fully understood in the art world, which largely admires his paintings. Looks enthusiastic about doing. He seems to be painting more than anything else).
“I think of it all as a layer of repetition. It’s on top of that,” he said. “The book is also about commemorating the group and keeping it together. The paintings go out to the world alone as seen alone, but they are also continuous in the way they were made. And should be seen together. “
For the past decade, acceptance of Wool’s work, like some of his peers, has been conditioned by stratospheric prices dictated by his paintings in harsh markets — 2015. One was Sotheby’s, which sold for nearly $ 30 million.And even though his auction status has recently cooled, the main paintings are still in the hands of millions, as modeling has become a central stage. Wool, 67, almost denounces questions about the impact of market tactics on the lives and jobs of artists, and addressing them inevitably risks dishonest and unfortunate sounds for success. It states.
But he adds: “Not only are you in the car, you can also feel like you’re not driving. It feels like you’re tied up behind the car and no one even tells you where you’re going.” For some reason or other reasons, he called it a pandemic — he and his wife, the painter. Charline von HeylSpent alone, primarily in Marfa, Texas, and began living and working in 2007, eventually becoming a crucial reset.
“I was joking that I was a painter on Sunday because I was so busy with my career work that Sunday was the only time I actually painted,” he said. “I was really my wit end at the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve been on a treadmill for a long time. And suddenly I felt like I could be an artist again. I just worked.”
Growing up in Chicago, the son of a psychiatrist (mother) and a molecular biologist (father), Wool moved to New York in 1973, attended studio school, and was born by the late 1980s as neo-expressionism collapsed. rice field. To a more speculative painting. Over the years, he agreed to a relatively small number of interviews. This is due to deep doubts about the ability of language to understand what art is doing in a way that does not sound miserable. (His friend, writer and musician Richard Hell once said, instead of talking to him, “What would I say if I were Christopher Wool?”)
However, during a long afternoon studio visit in April, wearing a Levi’s shirt from Pearl Snap and a long gray ponytail that grew up between pandemics, he talked carefully about himself and his work, The process of its creation was enthusiastic when explaining the labyrinth.
He said his time at Marfa was partly related to deepening his relatively recent advance into sculpture, which began with his first trip to western Texas. He roamed the ranch land and shrubs of the high desert, cleaning small tangles of abandoned fence wires. This hit him as a ready-made 3D graffiti of the kind he created in 2D. Some scrap he left untouched (“I couldn’t find a way to improve them”). But most of the others he manipulated to make small enthusiastic sculptures, Some of them have expanded over the years By casting them and manufacturing them in bronze and copper-plated steel.
He said the next essential turn in thinking about sculpture was to take a picture of it and make a book. “Bad Rabbit” -the title was inspired by the cunning Jack Rabbit of West Texas and the memory of Wool who heard about the CIA’s operations by name-92 of small wire carvings on a rough wooden floor. A photo of an old Malfa house, consisting only of a high-contrast deadpan portrait, shot straight low, like from a scenic spot on a passing rat.
For critics (and a few) who complain that Wool’s work is too chilly and too demanding, we offer Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight. Formerly known as “uneased dullness” The sculptural picture will probably solve the case. But only by pure obsession, this book sharply unravels the now-significant arc of wool’s involvement with photography and catalyzes his remaining work. “How can I get to know my thoughts until I understand what I’m saying?”
In 1993, Wool published his first photobook. “Absent without vacation” In a very grainy shot of a scene in a city in Europe or elsewhere where he traveled, the photo goes through a copier and blurs almost unreadable people.
10 years after this “Breakdown of East Broadway” Excerpts from thousands of almost empty photos taken by Wool from 1994 to 1995 on a walk between the studio and his home in Chinatown at night in and around Lower East Side Street. In their apparent disgust and unplannedness, they showed an affinity with postwar Japanese photography. But they are very unique, and how much the visual landscape of the wool city of New York in the 1990s (spills, dirt, black trash bags, dazzling headlights, wire mesh fences, scribbles of graffiti, stencil words) makes the picture. Shows if you have filled it deeply.
“Chicago, where I grew up, had that look, but especially New York at the time was just a gritty, gritty place. I was visually interested in all of that.” He said.
Curator Ann Ponteny, who organized the Brussels show and first exhibited a picture of wool with his paintings in 2002, said: What he is doing. His abstraction is by no means purely formal. It’s an abstraction that tells a lot about his life. “
She added: “I think his dedication to books does two things. It puts a great distance on making art and seeing art. All gestures are highly processed. It also It’s also a way to stay in control of what he’s doing and maintain some sense of ownership. Books are a very democratic way for works to be distributed around the world outside the circuit of the market. . “
Leo Fitzpatrick running Gallery public access On Henry Street in the Lower East Side, we recently hosted a show of dozens of photos from “East Broadway Breakdown,” which is shown as a book page rather than a photo print. Fitzpatrick carefully dismantled a copy of the book and fixed the pages to the wall. He felt that this was an ideal way to display his work.
“To me, his photographs seemed to influence many of the people who followed him. For example, in the 90’s I was paying attention when there weren’t many other photographers. “Young photographers, such as Dash Snow,” said Fitzpatrick. An American artist who died in 2009. “I think his picture is independent.”
Music and looks with television, Heartbreakers, Richard Hell, and Boydoid’s band helped define a crucial era of aesthetic life in downtown New York. Claims to have achieved something more than providing the gist for.
“I don’t think these streets looked like that before Christopher,” said Hell, who collaborated in the 2008 book. “Psychopt” With wool. “What he got was everything we consciously or unknowingly found under notice, or despised and edited. His photographs make us aware of it now. It is. “
Since starting to spend a lot of time in vacant lots in western Texas, wool has largely had to change its urban aesthetic appeal. But in a sense, he took advantage of those charms in different terrains and traveled further to photograph landscapes and what humans do in them: ruined tire piles, tumbleweed blocks. With scrapped cars, overgrown weeds, plastic patio furniture, a particularly lonely cow seen from the rear, and tumbleweed rolling down a wet street.
“I don’t know where to take the sculpture next,” he said. “That is, I’ve caught almost all the wires found in western Texas. Maybe I should start working in a completely new vein as it may not be able to continue to provide me with new ideas. You will have to. “
However, at a turning depth, one vein will continue to be mined. He smiled when he saw a brand new piece in his studio, composed of winding oil paintings, created directly on top of pages of an old book that already had an image of intricate abstraction. Book — Of course. “
