Christopher Wool (b.1955, Chicago) is an American artist residing in New York City. Since the 1980s, Wool’s studio practice has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas – moving beyond theoretical readings. Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times, said, “Christopher Wool made some of the punchiest paintings of the 1980s and 1990s: big, signlike word pictures that delivered gnomic, vaguely alarming messages.”
Writing in 2000, in The New York Times, Ken Johnson highlighted Wool’s response to an observation made on the street as significant, “in the 1980s, Christopher Wool was doing a Neo-Pop sort of painting using commercial rollers to apply decorative patterns to white panels. One day he saw a new white truck violated by the spray-painted words ‘sex’ and ‘luv.’ Mr. Wool made his own painting using those words and went on to make paintings with big, black stenciled letters saying things like ‘Run Dog Run’ or ‘Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids.’ The paintings captured the scary, euphoric mood of a high-flying period not unlike our own.”
