Published by Christopher Wool in 1997 Ninth Street IncidentThis is a collection of his studio photos taken while filing a fire insurance claim. His bland snapshots document blown-out windows, collapsed ceilings and torn-up floors – with papers and materials strewn everywhere. In one of the photos, however, two of Wool’s paintings are seen leaning against the wall, intact amid the ruins.
See Stop Run, an exhibition in a century-old office building in New York’s financial district, focuses on Wool’s work from the past decade, though his practice dates back to the 1980s. The exhibition features photographs of undamaged paintings—a temporal anomaly, but an appropriate inclusion given that the exhibition is held in a burned-out, unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. A decade after his stenciled text, florals, and spray-painted graffiti filled the Guggenheim Museum’s spiral ramp, the artist rekindled his early punk spirit by placing his work in a decidedly less refined setting that recalls the dilapidation of his fire-ravaged studio.
Coiled cables dangle from the ceiling of the vast, U-shaped venue. Uneven, partially removed floors reveal decorative pink and black tiles, and workers have left cigarette-stained handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled math equations, and vulgar graffiti on the walls. Abundant windows offer visitors stunning views of Lower Manhattan and flood the space with daylight, but there is a lack of continuous wall space. So Wall hung the work sporadically on pockmarked columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted, unfinished walls. A framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hanging above a pile of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as evidence of authentication, if not due to legal requirements.
Christopher Wool’s exhibition “See, Stop, Run” at the 101 Greenwich Street office building in New York in 2024.
Photograph by Christopher Wool
Only in the post-pandemic era, when demand for office leasing was suppressed, did Wohl have the opportunity to rent the property. The artist is not a typical tenant, and he still spent a lot of money to rent the space and bring it into compliance with regulations; he even had to set up a company so that he could “lend” his work to the exhibition. Historically, emerging artists and emerging institutions have taken advantage of economic downturns to exhibit work in unconventional locations. But for Wohl, financial concerns are not a motivation. He is an artist with considerable financial resources and privilege, and dealers may compete to show (and sell) his work. His goal, according to an accompanying essay by curator Anne Pontégnie, is to “escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”
If this strategy weren’t so consistent with his process, it might seem contrived—an artist using the aesthetics of ruins to reinforce a sense of resilience in his own work. Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his work, whether by degrading the quality of reproductions or by continually reworking it. By exhibiting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in environments that deny clarity and order, he once again tests the resilience and adaptability of his art.
Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, blurring, altering scale, distortion and collage to generate new images from pre-existing works, swirling around while tumbling forward. This is not apparent in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though certain forms and motifs do run throughout. Many of the paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” inkblots that Wool made in enamel in 1986 (not on display). Between 2020-23, Wool painted on digital inkjet prints of these contoured spots. A group of ten paintings hangs in a grid on the few walls the artist has added, but one gets the sense that he has produced endless variations from these accident-based images. In turn, an early painting in the series, Untitled (2020), became the basis for a pair of large-scale screen prints, both Untitled (2023). These nearly identical, oversized objects greet viewers as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s talent for creating difference through repetition.
Christopher Wool’s exhibition “See, Stop, Run” at the 101 Greenwich Street office building in New York in 2024.
Photograph by Christopher Wool
A highlight of the exhibition is a series of intricate sculptures that Wool has made over the past decade from recycled rancher wire and fencing from around his home in Marfa, Texas—though they often disappear into the clutter of the background. The jumble of scrap metal recalls tumbleweeds, but Wool achieves an impressive variety of forms. His earliest works were Untitled (2013), is a surprisingly elegant mass of rusted barbed wire, suspended at eye level like a low-hanging chandelier. Untitled (2019) is a tangled mass of twisted wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact, like densely woven bird’s nests. It is one of several works that Wool has enlarged and cast in rose-tinted bronze. Untitled (2021) Perched precariously on a pedestal – a dancer twirls. Bad Bunny (2022), Wool photocopied images of his wire structures to enhance contrast and flatten the sculptures, thus heightening their relationship to the lines he had drawn.
Wall’s painted and carved lines converge into a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Adapted from a 2021 oil on paper, it itself is a reworking of an earlier silkscreen, with squares of stone and glass mimicking the pixelated distortion of a digitized source. Standing 11 feet tall and stretching from floor to ceiling, the painting looks like it was custom-made for the site (but it isn’t). Farther uptown, another office building—Two Manhattan West—is home to Wool’s first mosaic. This similar but much larger mosaic Intercity Transportation (2023) towers over visitors to the spacious lobby of this gleaming new development, suggesting that the artist could also get along with the moneyed elite. The version on display in this exhibition is far more modest: a cloud of swirling black, white, and dirty pink that fits better with the bustle of this transitional space. The mosaic matches the hue of the site’s exposed tiles, which look as if they were excavated during construction.
Wool could have easily mounted this exhibition at one of New York’s ever-expanding blue-chip galleries (he showed many of these works at Xavier Hufken’s brand-new gallery in Brussels two years ago). But the ready-made rawness of the venue complements the willfully raw energy of his work. Ultimately, the building’s exposed interior draws our attention to the multiple layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried under layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—the cumulative history of images.
