Celebrated contemporary American abstract artist, Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool is widely regarded as one of the most important abstract artists alive today. Best-known for his word paintings and prints, Wool has also created numerous abstract pieces of work, and these are highly sought-after on today’s market.
Though Wool is a controversial figure in the art world, his pieces fetch incredibly-high sums; his prints, for instance, regularly sell for between £1,000 and £5,000 at auction, and they frequently fetch up to £50,000.
Despite being one of the most successful contemporary artists in the world, fairly little is known about Christopher Wool’s private life, and he rarely gives interviews. Despite this, it is possible to learn some things about the artist; below are six things you might not have known about Christopher Wool.
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He Is Inspired By His Urban Surroundings
Christopher Wool was born in Chicago, but he moved to New York in the early 1970s, where he has lived and worked ever since. The New York Wool knew at the time was a heady mixture of punk and bohemianism – the same kind of environment that Jean-Michel Basquiat was immersed in. The young Christopher Wool threw himself into the underground scene, and the influence of the city can still be keenly felt in his prints and paintings today.
Christopher Wool once said: “New York was, especially back then, just a gritty, gritty place, and I was interested visually in all of it.” That gritty urbanism is reflected in the colours and shapes of many of his prints and paintings, including One Year No Halloween (P464), which was sold by Phillips de Pury & Company in November 2010 for £309,050, and Untitled (2006), which was sold by Christie’s in February 2014 for £160,000.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For Over £770,000
Untitled is a silkscreen on linen from 2011. Its sombre colours and inkblot-like appearance resembles a Rorschach test, though without the symmetry. When questioned what Hermann Rorschach (the creator of the psychological test) knew, Christopher Wool replied simply: “The mind is in the eye.”
Whether Wool intended Untitled (2011) to echo the Rorschach tests or not is unsure, but one thing is clear: the print captured the attention of the art market. In May 2024, Christie’s sold it for £770,771, nearly £100,000 over its estimate.
Untitled Sold by Christie’s in 2024
He Participated In The Venice Biennale
In 2011, Christopher Wool participated in the 54th Venice Biennale. The artist exhibited eight huge silkscreens covered in inkblot-style marks like those found in the Untitled print from the same year. In the words of Mark Godfrey, a curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern, “Wool’s new paintings push the artist’s long consideration of abstraction, shape, and gesture to a different plane. They take up ideas that the artist has long considered”, and they “raise pressing questions about contemporary experience.”
His Word Paintings Were Inspired By Graffiti
Living in New York, Christopher Wool naturally comes across graffiti and street art on a regular basis. The story goes that Wool was inspired to create word paintings in 1987 after coming across a new white truck that had just been festooned with fresh graffiti. The stencilled, spray-painted tag read ‘SEX LUV’, and seeing it was a seminal moment for Wool; captivated by the text’s visceral immediacy, the artist went to his studio and made his first word painting. These would go on to make his name as an influential contemporary artist. Although he is best-known for his word art, strangely, it’s Wool’s abstract creations which sell best amongst his prints.
Graffiti in New York
He Loves Photographing New York At Night
Over the years, Christopher Wool has frequently photographed his home city and one of his main inspirations, New York. The images are black-and-white, and the artist captures them at night as he strolls along the urban streets, often travelling between his house and his studio.
According to the art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, the photographs “are dismal with a vengeance, an encyclopaedia of wrack, ruin, and squalor, wanly bleached by flash illumination. To make the world appear uniformly horrible requires rare discipline.” That dismal grimness is also reflected in the monochrome greys and blacks that dominate much of Wool’s work, including Untitled (P489), which was sold by Phillips de Pury & Company in October 2010 for £275,000.
He Uses Technology In His Work
One of Wool’s favourite techniques when printmaking is to take photographs of his abstract paintings, then cut out the sections he particularly likes. Next, he uses a computer to reassemble the images in new ways whilst adding new elements; the result is a kind of strange collage, the aim being that it’s impossible to tell how such a thing was created. Prints which use this technique include Untitled from 2006, which was sold by Christie’s in February 2014 for £160,000.
Wool is undeniably a controversial figure in today’s art world, and although he represents groundbreaking innovation for some, many others don’t understand how he’s become so popular. As Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 2013, however, “like it or not, Christopher Wool, now fifty-eight, is probably the most important American painter of his generation.”
Christopher Wool, Camden Art Centre, 2004
