For me, Wool is a very pure version of something dissonant and poignant. His all-or-nothing, caustic-cerebral, ambivalent-belligerent gambit is riveting and even a little thrilling. It's what makes him one of the more optically alive painters out there.
-Jerry Saltz on Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool (b. 1955) was born in Chicago and now lives and works in New York. He is one of the most recognized abstract painters working today. His influential method and practice has dramatically evolved throughout his career. Over the years, he has developed a number of signature techniques; interested in the visual representation of language and color through abstraction, he is best known for his graphic black and white word paintings.
He has consistently questioned painting as a medium by deliberately removing himself from historical conventions and uses the process of painting as a vehicle for critique from within. What persists in his experimental work is a willingness to confront the ongoing dislocations and tensions between the configuration and the representational dimensions of the artistic process. The result is a refusal, which is as much political as it is aesthetic, of the agreeable synthesis of configuration and representation in classical art theory.