Christopher Wool, Untitled (P186), 1993
© Christopher Wool
Kunsthaus Graz
Graz, Austria
September 26, 2009- January 10, 2010
Curator: Peter Pakesch
A legend even in his lifetime, Andy Warhol was known as a celebrity and public figure. Often described as a sphinx, he was adept at concealing his real artistic importance behind media packaging. Warhol took a cool look at painting as a medium, querying in the 1960s the existence and function of pictures in a completely new way. Later developments in the world of electronic images fully confirmed the relevance of his approach. A revolutionary leap into a new world of interpreting the meaning of art had already taken place in the 1950s with the work of Barnett Newman. A painter with a social and political agenda, Newman developed a fundamental, abstract formal idiom that completely redefined physical, mental and spiritual space with a new, radical take on aesthetics and the uncompromising implementation of it. Painting Real fathoms the explosive force of the works by Newman and Warhol from the perspective of one America’s most significant contemporary painters: Christopher Wool. For him, today’s art and approach to pictures would be inconceivable without the input of Warhol and Newman in the previous generation. Wool’s Word Paintings constitute a further step in the development of painting as a key medium of our visual reality. For someone like him, art and involvement with pictures has become inconceivable without Warhol. With a radicalism comparable with that of Warhol and Newman, Wool combines immediacy, indifference and commitment – a mix of concepts that is far from common, indeed contradictory, but therewith all the more explosive!
A catalog accompanies the exhibition.
