Christopher Wool

Paris

For over 30 years, Christopher Wool has been exploring the complexities of abstract painting by constantly questioning the medium with ever fresh means: the use of repetition, of methods from conceptual and minimal art, the adaptation of photographic images, and working with such different techniques as spray-paint, silkscreen and digital reproduction. The exhibition, which was designed in close collaboration with the artist, focuses on more than thirty large-format works painted between 2000 and 2011.

Christopher Wool, who was born in Chicago in 1955, emerged onto the New York scene during the mid-1980’s along with artists Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, and Robert Gober, Wool has always been a painter first and foremost, and his approach to the limits of that medium continue to prove an inspiration to a younger generation.

During the 1990s, Wool established himself with work that had a stark, street-wise aesthetic: mostly black-and-white abstractions of patterns and painterly gestures, or stencilled word paintings that directly addressed the viewer with dead-pan humour.

In the new millennium, the pictorial construction of his paintings underwent a profound metamorphosis. The pictorial elements – often spray-painted black lines or photographic images of previous pictures silkscreened onto the canvas – became more and more compositionally complex and diffuse.

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

March 30th – August 19th, 2012
11 avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris
France

Calendar