Christopher Wool, Art Edition

His painting spells TRBL: Christopher Wool's stark and beautiful art

Covering all work phases in large-scale reproductions accompanied by extensive texts as well as production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself.

The Art Edition is limited to 100 numbered copies, each signed by the artist and including an artwork specially produced by Christopher Wool for this publication, also signed and numbered by him. The work is a silkscreen print on fine art paper, for which the artist used digitally collaged photographs of his paintings, appropriating his own work so as to arrive at a new, purely abstract image that has the allure of a classical art print (paper size 55.9 x 43.2 cm, image size 19.8 x 15.2 cm).



In-your-face, achingly simple, deceptively frank, the work of Christopher Wool is so very New York. Though he owes a debt to abstract expressionism and pop art, he completely transcends—even demolishes—these genres. Whether it’s a text-based painting or an abstract spray-painted piece, his work is immediately engaging. Wool questions painting, like many other artists in his generation, but he doesn’t provide any easy answers. “The harder you look the harder you look,” as he titled one of his word paintings, is an excellent example of how he states the obvious whilst provoking us to think deeper about what seems obvious.

Christopher Wool became known in the mid-1980s through allover paintings produced with rubber rollers commonly used to simulate decorative wallpaper patterns on walls. By 1988 he had hit stride with his dry, dead-pan word paintings (“Trbl,” “Riot,” “Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids”), while continuing to explore the possibilities of pattern painting. Since the 1990s, he has been developing the painterly qualities of his work, using a mostly black-and-white palette, starting from abstract lines drawn with a spraygun or layered stock images, overpainting silkscreens on linen, wiping out images, with a widening variety of media, a process that can involve photography, silkscreen, and, in the new millennium, also the computer.

Exploring Wool’s work in close to 500 pages, this monograph is exhaustive in its scope and depth. All work phases are covered in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Editor Hans Werner Holzwarth has previously collaborated on several catalogs and artist’s books with Wool. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann Goldstein, Anne Pontégnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks make this book a great read as well as a definitive study of the story so far.

About the editor:
Hans Werner Holzwarth was a photographer before launching a corporate design firm. He has collaborated on book designs with Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, Kiki Smith, and John Waters. For TASCHEN, he edited Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, and Art Now Vol 3.

Texts by:
Eric Banks, former senior editor of Artforum, is a writer based in New York. Ann Goldstein is Senior Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Writer and musician Richard Hell is the author of the novels Go Now and Godlike, and of the collection Hot and Cold. Jim Lewis is the author of three novels—most recently, The King is Dead—and numerous essays on the visual arts. Glenn O’Brien is a writer who lives in New York. He is editorial director of Interview and Art in America. Anne Pontégnie is an independent curator and art critic who lives in Brussels.