Christopher Wool - biography
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Christopher Wool was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1955. His father was professor of microbiology and his mother a psychiatrist, and he spent his childhood in Chicago, the city he often claims as his place of birth. He moved to New York in the 1980s and joined the artist’s group which included Robert Gober, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach. During this period, Wool produced his first ornamental paintings using ink rollers, an implement normally used in the production of decorative colour wallpaper. In 1984 and 1986, he exhibited in the Cable Gallery in New York and a further exhibition followed in the Robin Lockett Gallery in Chicago. Despite these early successes, New York was a thankless place in the 1980s for fine artists, who generally had to struggle to get by and could barely count on a decent income. It is therefore all the more impressive that Christopher Wool was able to hold his own under these circumstances – perhaps it was precisely this difficult environment that was needed for the brittle art of the idiosyncratic American to find its audience.
With his work, Christopher Wool likes to leave things to chance. The concrete vision of a painter is abhorrent to him, instead preferring to leave it to the material and tools to generate an appealing result in casual combination. The artist is equally original and flexible in his choice of utensils: Wool uses a paint roller from the DIY store with the same intensity as a spray gun, stamp, or finger. The idiosyncratic artist sabotages his own work with great relish and fervour: he smears solvent around in the paint he has just applied, tears letter collages apart beyond recognition, or scatters seemingly unmotivated splashes of paint. Wool also does not seem adverse to the use of modern media, always stretching the concept of painting to the limit of bearable and sometimes even – consciously and unconsciously – transgressing it. Wool basically holds the conviction that an artist does not necessarily need a paintbrush.
At a time when New York’s art market was on its knees, the painter without a brush celebrated success: in 1989, Christopher Wool took part in the biannual Whitney Biennial and in the even more significant documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, whilst his so-called Rorschach series, in which he based his designs on the famous inkblot pictures of the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, received much attention. An idiosyncratic designer, Wool is one of those artists who becomes completely absorbed by their work and requires little attention; accordingly, his interviews are rare (and coveted). Despite his numerous exhibitions, Christopher Wool has not received many prizes and awards: In 2009 he received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize – a special experience for the artist as it was his first ever award.
Christopher Wool lives and works in New York and is married to the German painter Charline von Heyl.
© Kunsthaus Lempertz
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