Christopher Wool, Art Edition (Limited Edition)

In your face, achingly simple, deceptively frank, the work of Christopher Wool is so very New York. Though he owes a debt to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, he completely transcends these genres. Whether it’s a text-based painting or an abstract spray-painted piece, Wool questions painting, like many other artists in his generation, but he doesn’t provide any easy answers. As one piece proclaims, “The harder you look the harder you look.”

Wool became known in the mid-1980s through all-over paintings produced with rubber rollers commonly used to simulate decorative wallpaper patterns on walls. By 1988 he had hit stride with his dry, dead-pan word paintings (“Trbl,” “Riot,” “Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids”), while continuing to explore the possibilities of pattern painting. From the 1990s, he developed the painterly qualities of his work, using a mostly black-and-white palette, starting from abstract lines drawn with a spray gun or layered stock images, overpainting silk screens on linen, wiping out images, with a widening variety of media, including photography, silkscreen, and computer graphics.

This impressive Art Edition, signed by the artist, comes with an original Wool artwork produced exclusively for this publication, a digital collage of photographs of Wool paintings that arrives at a new, entirely abstract image. Across more than 500 pages,the monograph itself covers all phases of Wool’s career to date in large-scale reproductions, production Polaroids,and installation photos by Wool himself. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann Goldstein, Anne Pontégnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks make this book a great read as well as a definitive study of the artist’s oeuvre so far.

Limited Art Edition of 100 copies, each signed by Christopher Wool, including a silk-screen print on fine art paper also signed by the artist

Texts by

Eric Banks, former senior editor of Artforum, is a writer based in New York.

Ann Goldstein is Director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and formerly was Senior Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Richard Hell, writer and musician, is the author of the novels Go Now and Godlike and the collection Hot and Cold. His memoir, called I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, will be published in 2013.

Jim Lewis is the author of three novels—most recently, The King Is Dead—and numerous essays on the visual arts.

Glenn O’Brien is a writer who lives in New York. He is the author of How to Be a Man, Human Nature (dub version), and Soap Box.

Anne Pontégnie is an independent curator and art writer working from Brussels.

The editor

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include Collector’s Editions like Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Ai Weiwei, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs like the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat and survey books such as Modern Art and Art Now! Vols 3 and 4.