Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool was born in 1955 in Chicago. He lives and works in New York. Wool provides tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. By painting layer upon layer of whites and off–whites over silkscreened elements used in previous works, monochrome forms taken from reproductions, enlargements of details of photographs, screens, and polaroids of his own paintings, he accretes the surface of his pressurized paintings while apparently voiding their very substance. Through these various procedures of application and cancellation, Wool obscures the liminal traces of previous elements, putting reproduction and negative to generative use in forming a new chapter in contemporary painting. Conception of artist books occupy an important part of his practice.