A brush with… Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. Wool, who was born in Chicago in 1955, and lives between New York and Marfa, Texas, today, is a sophisticated and dextrous explorer of the act of making paintings and other forms of art. He emerged in a period in which painting’s validity was being questioned amid the supremacy of conceptual and photographic practices in the avant-garde scene of New York in the late 1970s. And he has made light of that doubt in a cerebral practice in which he probes paint’s capacity to reflect diverse material properties, processes and effects, its openness to chance events and slippages, and its ability to contain or convey meaning through words and image. Working in often overlapping series embodied by particular methods or tools, propositions and actions, his practice has been one of relentless curiosity, where his own output is consistently reevaluated and recast through the literal repurposing of existing imagery as the foundation of new works. Though best known for his paintings, Christopher has made photographs from the start of his career, and since the mid-2010s has developed a fertile seam of sculpture. His work across all these media is similarly agile, with the different strands in a seemingly endless evolving conversation on pictorial, material and spatial concerns. He discusses the seismic effect of experiencing the Art Ensemble of Chicago and an installation by Dan Flavin as a young person, seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first New York solo show with Dieter Roth, how Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye influenced one of his untitled text paintings, and eventually the title of his recent acclaimed New York and Marfa show, See Stop Run, and how jazz has been a consistent source of inspiration. He gives insight into his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate, “What is art for?”

Christopher Wool, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, until 19 December; See Stop Run West Texas, Brite Building, Marfa, Texas, until at least May 2027.

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