Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2007
Private Collection
Christopher Wool
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
April 21-July 12, 2009
Christopher Wool is not only an abstract painter, he is also an explorer of abstraction. Wool belongs to the generation of painters who has explored, since the 1980s, in new and unprecedented ways, the fundamental concerns of painting. The relations between the picture plane and the shapes applied to it; color contrasts between black and white; the painterly and the graphic; the unique and the reproduced; the relationship between line and surface. His exhibition at Museum Ludwig traces the migration of abstract imagery through different media of representation, namely free-flowing painting and the silkscreened print. In his paintings he brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, spontaneous impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent – to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces. Wool's paintings and silkscreen prints on paper reveal the entire range of his techniques. The main focus of the exhibition is on Wool's abstract paintings and silkscreen prints since 2006.
