Christopher Wool at Guggenheim museum

A huge retrospective with over 90 of Wool's works was exhibited at Guggenheim museum. From the beginning of the spiral entry to the top the viewer can see most of Wools' major works.  

                                                                                                                                                            Karsten Moran

Wool's career started when he moved in the 1970's to New York city where he set up to explore the possibilities of painting. He made a defining breakthrough between 1986 and 1987 when he began to use paint rollers incised with floral and geometric designs to transfer patterns in severe black enamel to a white ground. 

Untitled, 1995

Enamel on aluminium.

In tandem with his pattern paintings, Wool developed a body of work that similarly subverted a set of existing forms, this time using language as his appropriated subject matter. He freely stripped out punctuation, disrupted conventional spacing, and removed letters.

Trouble, 1989.

Enamel and acrylic on aluminium.

Apocalypse Now, 1988 

Enamel on paper.

Wool titled it after Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979)

In November 2013 art dealer Christophe van de Weghe 

bought on behalf of a client at Christie's New York for $26.4 million.

Untitled, 1990

Sold at Christie's London in February 2012 for $7.7 million.

Wool's attraction to the bleak poetic of urban margins was amplified in his first major photography series "Absent Without Leave" (1993). Taken during a period of solitary travels in Europe and elsewhere, the images are saturated with an atmosphere of alienation and shot raw, without any concern for technical refinement. 

A similar spirit of disaffection pervades a parallel work titled "East Broadway Breakdown" (1994-95/2002), but in this series, Wool documented his nightly walk home from his East Village studio. 

Over the past decade, Wool's simultaneous embrace and repression of his paintings potential have culminated in an open-ended vein of works that he refers to as his "gray paintings". In these large-scale abstractions, Wool alternates between the act of erasing and the act of drawing, repeatedly wiping away sprayed black enamel paint to create layers of tangled lines and hazy washes. 

Untitled, 2007

Enamel on linen. 

Christopher Wool was born in 1955 in Chicago, he lives and works in New York.