Christopher Wool Chicago, IL, USA, b. 1955

Christopher Wool is an American artist whose practice since the 1980s has focused on the structural possibilities of painting and its dialogue with urban imagery and mechanical reproduction. Through strategies of repetition, erasure, and reconfiguration, Wool redefined abstraction for a contemporary context, transforming fragments of language and traces of the city into a field of painterly experimentation.

Wool studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and at the New York Studio School, later continuing his studies in film at New York University. In the late 1970s, he moved to Manhattan, where the city’s dynamic underground culture — shaped by music, cinema, and the visual arts — became a crucial context for the evolution of his practice.

From the outset, Wool focused on redefining the possibilities of painting. Rejecting the expressionism of color and gesture, he turned instead to a restrained monochrome palette, employing industrial tools and motifs drawn from mass culture — print media, advertising, music, and film — to blur the boundaries between painting, print, and reproduction.

In the 1990s, silkscreen became a central element of his work. Dense layers of repeated patterns were often disrupted by stains, erasures, or aerosol marks resembling urban graffiti, evoking the raw energy of the city. By the end of the decade, Wool had moved increasingly toward abstraction, exploring repetition, elimination, and digital alteration as ways to extend the expressive potential of painting. His use of rollers and stamps to transfer ornamental patterns in black enamel onto white ground remains one of the most recognizable innovations of his practice.

Through his celebrated Word Paintings, Wool examined the intersection of language and image, composing terse, fractured phrases that confront the viewer with both clarity and ambiguity. Within these works — as in his abstractions — the artist intentionally introduced slips, gaps, and interruptions, destabilizing perception and transforming the act of viewing into an encounter with uncertainty and emotion.