Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool is an American artist renowned for his paintings featuring large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases.

Biography of Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool was born in Chicago in 1955. In 1973, he moved to New York City.

The artist studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville and The New York Studio School in New York (under Jack Tworkov and Harry Krame). After a brief period of formal training at the New York Studio School, he dropped out to immerse himself in the underground film and music scene. From 1980 to 1984, he worked part-time as a studio assistant for Joel Shapiro.

In the late 1980s, Wool started creating word paintings, reportedly inspired by seeing graffiti on a brand-new white truck.

In 1988, Wool and fellow artist Robert Gober presented a collaborative exhibition and installation at 303 Gallery, featuring Wool's seminal text-based painting "Apocalypse Now" (1988). Since the early 1990s, the silkscreen has remained a primary tool in Wool's artistic practice.

Although primarily known as a painter, Wool has also created an extensive collection of black-and-white photographs taken at night in the streets between the Lower East Side and Chinatown. This project, which began in the mid-1990s, was resumed and completed in 2002.

Wool has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1989), served as a DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence (1992), and received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize. In 2010, he was honored with amfAR's Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS.

His solo exhibitions have been held at various prestigious galleries and museums worldwide, including Hill Art Foundation in New York, Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, Fondation Beyeler in Hurden, Luhring Augustine in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne, Gagosian Gallery in Rome, Simon Lee in London, among other esteemed venues.

The artist lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas, alongside his wife, fellow painter Charline von Heyl.

Christopher Wool's Art Style

Christopher Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he also employs a wide range of styles. Utilizing techniques such as spray painting, hand painting, and screen-printing, he creates a dynamic tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, and depth and flatness.

By applying layer upon layer of whites and off-whites over screen-printed elements from his previous works—monochrome forms derived from reproductions, photograph enlargements, and Polaroids of his own paintings—he builds up the surface of his pressurized paintings while seemingly voiding their substance.

Through these diverse procedures of application and cancellation, Wool obscures the faint traces of previous elements, using reproduction and negation creatively to shape a new chapter in contemporary painting. As a result, his paintings are defined as much by what they are not and what they withhold as by what they are.