Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool was born in 1955 in Chicago, Illinois, and studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the New York Studio School before establishing a practice that has unfolded across New York and Marfa, Texas. Since his first solo exhibition at Cable Gallery, New York, in 1984, he has built one of the most consistently interrogated bodies of work in contemporary American painting — one that treats language, surface, and the act of making as inseparable problems rather than separate concerns.

Wool came to wide attention through his text paintings of the late 1980s, works in which words and phrases are stenciled onto aluminum in enamel, stripped of punctuation and spacing until meaning buckles under its own weight. Apocalypse Now (1988) is among the most discussed of these: the phrase "SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS" is compressed into a single high-pressure image that draws equally on appropriation, commercial language, and a deep unease about authorship and intent. The Show Is Over (1993) extends this investigation, functioning simultaneously as declaration and self-cancellation, while Gray Painting (1990) marks a turn toward damaged abstraction, in which overpainting and erasure transform the residue of a prior image into the painting's actual subject. Across these works, Wool consistently refuses the stability of a finished statement.

His exhibition history spans four decades and multiple continents. Early solo presentations at Robbin Lockett Gallery, Chicago, in 1986 and at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, in 1989 — the first of what would become eight solo shows with that gallery — were followed by exhibitions at Jean Bernier, Athens, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Galerie Samia Saouma, Paris, among others. Institutional recognition includes a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and representation in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2006, Wool held a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, a relationship with that landscape that has remained central to his practice. Recent solo exhibitions at Gagosian in New York (2024) and London (2025), at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2022), and the ongoing presentation See Stop Run West Texas at the Brite Building in Marfa — running from May 2025 through May 2027 — confirm the sustained momentum of his output. A monograph, See Stop Run, published by Holzwarth Publications in 2025 with texts by Anne Pontegnie and Wool himself, documents his 2024 New York exhibition. Wool is currently represented by Gagosian (New York and London), Luhring Augustine (New York), and Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin), and will be included in group exhibitions at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 2026 and at the AMA Collection in Venice through November of that year.