In-your-face, achingly simple, deceptively frank, the work of Christopher Wool is so very New York. Though he owes a debt to abstract expressionism and pop art, he completely transcends—even demolishes—these genres. Whether it’s a text-based painting or an abstract spray-painted piece, his work is immediately engaging. Wool questions painting, like many other artists in his generation, but he doesn’t provide any easy answers. “The harder you look the harder you look,” he puts it in one of his word paintings, and that is an excellent example of how he states the obvious whilst provoking us to think deeper about what seems obvious. This September a new monograph will be available on Taschen – In over 400 pages, all of Wool’s work phases are covered in large-scale reproductions, accompanied by production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann Goldstein, Anne Pontégnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks.
