Having grown up in Chicago, and then moving to downtown New York City, Christopher Wool (b. 1955) was surrounded by the revolutionary energy of the punk and No Wave scenes; with this influence on his creative development shown in the mid-1980s.
Wool favoured stark, monochromatic compositions that utilised commercial tools and imagery appropriated from the masses. His breakthrough body of work used rollers and stamps to transfer decorative patterns in black enamel to a white ground.
His “word paintings” from the same period focused on language as image (typography), exploring the union of image, text, and pattern. They feature perplexing, confrontational phrases; stencilled or plastered in black across flat white, occasionally covering the compositions with spray paint marks and screen-printed elements, erasing and re-layering. Broken up into lines and curves, the letters become intense compositional elements and potential catalysts for additional meaning.
The paintings blend the act of seeing, reading and speaking; teasing out the meanings of the broken words. Wool uses these unexpected methods in an otherwise strict formula to convey and communicate emotional states: ranging from foreboding pathos to aggression.
Wool’s work of the 1990s, houses the same conflict between control and chaos. Adopting the silkscreen as a primary tool, cartoonish flowers began to multiply in dense configurations, interrupted by bold passages of overpainting or spray-paint as an act of vandalism.