Christopher Wool - Hardcover

Banks, Eric

5

7 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3836535629 ISBN 13: 9783836535625

Publisher: TASCHEN, 2012

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Exploring Christopher Wool's meanings and messages in a comprehensive monographIn-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,” he puts it in one of his word paintings, and that 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 incorporated a widening variety of media in his work, including photography, silkscreen, and, in the new millennium, also the computer.

In over 400 pages, all of Wool's work phases are covered in large-scale reproductions, accompanied by production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann Goldstein, Anne Pont�gnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks make this book a great read as well as a definitive study of the artist's oeuvre so far.

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About the Author:

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 Pont�gnie is an independent curator and art critic who lives in Brussels.

The editor:
Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor based in Berlin, with numerous publications mainly on contemporary art and photography. For TASCHEN he has edited, among other titles, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen and Neo Rauch.

Review:

Christopher Wool's paintings put me in mind of rock'n'roll songs and how they recycle the same slender means: three, maybe four chords, a plaintive lyric repeated over and over in strict 4/4 time. It's not much compared with Hindemith, but an electric guitar in the right hands can be so riveting that it's the only sound you want to hear. (David Salle Town & Country)

Published to commemorate his retrospective at the Guggenheim museum, this catalog presents a vast selection of Christopher Wool's paintings, photographs and other works to date. (Noelle Lacombe CULTURED)

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