Christopher Wool Tries Blending Bad-Boy Energy with Blue Chip Clout

In 1997, Christopher Wool published Incident on 9th Street, a collection of photographs he took of his studio when filing an insurance claim for fire damage. His matter-of-fact snapshots record blown-out windows, a collapsed ceiling, and ripped up floors—documents and materials are scattered everywhere. Yet in one picture, two of Wool’s paintings lean against a wall, remarkably intact among the wreckage.

“See Stop Run,” an exhibition in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily surveys Wool’s last decade of work, though his practice dates to the 1980s. The show features the photograph of the unmarred paintings—a chronological outlier but a fitting inclusion given the show’s installation in a gutted and unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. Ten years after his stenciled words, floral patterns, and spray-painted squiggles filled the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraled ramp, the artist has situated his work in a dramatically less polished setting, one that recalls the degradation of his fire-ravaged studio and rekindles the punk ethos of his earlier days.

In the large, U-shaped venue, coiled cables droop from the ceiling. Uneven, partially demolished floors reveal decorative pink and black tiling, and workers have marked the walls with sooty handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled math equations, and profane doodles. Abundant windows afford visitors impressive views of lower Manhattan and fill the space with daylight, but continuous wall space is lacking. So as a result, Wool has hung works sporadically on pockmarked columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted and unfinished walls. One framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hangs atop a smattering of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as authenticating evidence, if not out of legal requirement.

This property only became available to Wool in a post-COVID market that dampened demand for office rentals. Hardly the typical tenant, the artist still spent considerable capital to rent the space and bring it up to code; he even had to incorporate himself in order to “loan” his own artworks to the show. Historically, emerging artists and burgeoning institutions have capitalized on depressed economies to exhibit in unconventional locations. But financial concerns were not a motivating factor for Wool, an artist of considerable means and privilege, one with dealers likely competing to show (and sell) his work. The goal, according to an accompanying essay by the curator Anne Pontégnie, was to “escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”

This strategy might seem contrived—an artist exploiting the aesthetics of ruin to enhance the grittiness of his own work—if it wasn’t so consistent with his process. Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his pictures, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that refutes clarity and orderliness, he is once again testing his art’s resilience and adaptability.

Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, obfuscation, shifts in scale, distortion, and collage to generate new imagery from preexisting works, circling back while tumbling forward. This is not immediately evident in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though certain forms and patterns do echo throughout. Numerous paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” blots Wool made with enamel in 1986 (not on view). Between 2020–23, Wool painted atop digitally altered inkjet prints of these silhouette-like splotches. A group of ten hangs in a grid on one of the few walls added by the artist, but one senses that he has generated endless variations from the chance-based images. In turn, one early painting from the series, Untitled (2020), formed the basis for a pair of large silkscreens, both Untitled (2023). Nearly identical, the supersized blobs greet visitors as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s aptitude for producing difference through repetition.

A highlight of the show is the series of knotty sculptures Wool has been fashioning over the last decade out of rancher’s wire and fencing salvaged around his home in Marfa, Texas—even though they too often disappear into the chaotic background. The jumbled scrap metal evokes tumbleweeds, but Wool achieves an impressive diversity of forms.His earliest, Untitled (2013), is a surprisingly graceful tangle of rusted barbed wire suspended at eye level like a low-slung chandelier. Untitled (2019) is an unruly, twisted cluster of wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact like densely woven nests. One of several that Wool enlarged and cast in a rosy, copper-plated bronze, Untitled (2021) perches precariously on a pedestal—a dancer in mid-pirouette. For Bad Rabbit (2022), Wool photocopied images of his wire formations to heighten the contrast and flatten the sculptures, enhancing their relationship to his painted line.

Wool’s painted and sculpted lines converge in a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Translated from a 2021 oil painting on paper, itself a re-working of an earlier screenprint, the squared-off stones and glass mimic the pixelated distortion of the digitized source. At eleven-feet tall, it spans from floor to ceiling and looks custom-made for the site (it wasn’t). Farther uptown, in another office building—Two Manhattan West—is Wool’s first mosaic. The similar but much larger Crosstown Traffic (2023) towers over visitors in the gleaming new development’s cavernous lobby, demonstrating that the artist can also play nice with the moneyed elite. The version jammed into this exhibition is far humbler: The cloud of black, white, and dirty pink swirls better aligns with the tumult of this transitional space. Matching the hues of the venue’s exposed tiles, the mosaic appears as if it was unearthed during construction.

Wool could have easily mounted this exhibition in one of New York’s ever-expanding blue-chip galleries (two years ago, he showed many of these works in Xavier Hufken’s pristine new gallery in Brussels). But the site’s ready-made rawness befits his work’s willfully gritty energy. Ultimately, the architecture’s exposed innards draw our attention to the many layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried beneath layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—an accumulated history of images.