Sold at Auction: Christopher Wool

(b Chicago, Illinois, 1955) American Neo-Pop Painter. Christopher Wool belongs to a generation of artists who in the early 1980s sought new possibilities in painting by successfully exploring the contradictions and interrelationship between abstraction and figuration. Furthermore, like many of his peers, Wool critically questioned the traditional implications of gestural brushstroke, hierarchical composition and expressive colors to evoke an individual and personal quality in one's work, as practiced by neo-expressive movements of the late 1970s and 1980s both in Europe and in America.* In order to visualize the general parameters of painting, content and composition within his oeuvre, the artist's earliest series of all-over works employed the technique of drip painting. Wool then produced the works with floral and ornamental designs by using commercial rollers to apply decorative patterns to white panels. It was in 1987 that Wool began to explore the use of words, influenced by the graffiti message --SEX LUV painted on the side of a while truck, stenciling his carefully chosen statements onto his surfaces.** Wool currently lives and works in New York City. (Credit: Sotheby’s New York, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, May 10, 2006, Lot 5. Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, November 8, 2005, Lot 3.)