Christopher Wool

Best known for patterned, stamped and stenciled paintings that follow an austere aesthetic, Christopher Wool (born 1955) has expanded his vocabulary during the years since 2000, using his own images, silkscreened or digitally treated, as source material for subsequent works. This handsomely designed volume, published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, offers three renowned authors approaching Wool’s recent paintings from different angles. John Corbett analyzes Wool’s navigation between jazz-like improvisation and deliberate composition; Fabrice Hergott focuses on the artist’s dialogue with the surface as a subject of the paintings; and John Kelsey digs into the artist’s media-savvy black-and-white painted images: “Gestures go viral, escaping one painting and contaminating another. A work recurs outside of itself, sometimes in a partial or fragmented way, always coming back remotely as another image--thicker, faster, sharper.”