When observing a painting by the contemporary artist Cristopher Wool, one cannot help but be fascinated by so much inspiration and originality. Wool is a worthy representative of modern art, an innovator who breaks with the patterns of the past, inventing a unique and particular way of painting.
Born in Chicago in 1955 and currently living and working in New York, he is one of the most highly regarded living abstract painters in the world. Over the years he has been able to put into practice a series of distinctive techniques, concerning the visual representation of language and colour through abstraction. For this reason, he is the best-known artist for his graphic paintings of black and white words.
The innovation lies in the fact that he has considered painting as a medium, deliberately detaching himself from historical conventions and using it as a critical tool. He is famous for his paintings of large black letters printed on white canvases. The painter began to create these paintings made of words around the ’80s and the inspiration as he tells us came from observing a graffito painted on a white truck.
In 1988 he presented with his colleague artist Robert Gobert at the 303 Gallery one of his first exhibitions, and a collaborative installation that included Apocalypse Now: a work that reproduces some words from the film Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. Cristopher Wool’s way of painting based on silkscreen printing; in his abstract works, he brings together figures and disfigured figures, drawing and painting, spontaneous impulses and bright ideas.
Christofer Wool’s Exhibition
Wool’s irreverent and original canvases have been exhibited all over the world, in fact, there are many museums where they have made stops including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. In 2009 he exhibited at the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. From 25 October 2013 to 22 January 2014, a retrospective of Wool’s work was on display at the Guggenheim Museum in
New York City and the Art Institute of Chicago in spring 2014.
Besides, the paintings of Wool’s Word made between the late 80s and early 2000s are the most sought after pieces on the art market. Cristopher Wool is one of those artists who never cease to amaze, each of his works is unique and rare, as it can convey that irreverent and innate originality typical of what is in effect a genius of art.
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by Stefania Abbruzzo