United Kingdom - Offset Lithograph on Paper, 1993

Christopher Wool’s paintings and prints explore the confluence of image, text, and pattern. They often feature enigmatic, confrontational found phrases or illegible scribbles, which are either stencilled or plastered in black across flat white fields. The artist occasionally covers the compositions with spray-paint marks and screen-printed elements (some taken from his previous works), erasing and relayering as he goes. His process—which focuses on the possibilities of reproduction, appropriation, and accretion—is as important as the results themselves. Wool studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the New York Studio School. New York’s vibrant 1970s downtown No Wave and punk scenes became major influences, and Wool reached his mature style in the mid-1980s. Wool has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, and beyond, and his work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. His work has achieved eight figures on the secondary market.

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Drawing from Minimalism and Conceptualism, Felix Gonzalez-Torres used everyday materials including puzzles, clocks, light strings, and paper to make poetic sculptures and installations that meditate on private and public loss. He allowed his familiar materials to emphasize other universal themes of love, politics, and sexuality, as well. Gonzalez-Torres’s work focused on ideas of formation and decay and often invited viewer participation. Untitled (Placebo) (1991), for example, features an arrangement of individually wrapped candies with an ideal weight of 1,000 to 1,200 pounds, while Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990) comprises a stack of paper printed with the names and photos of victims of gun violence—viewers are permitted to take both candies and papers from the exhibition space. Gonzalez-Torres featured at the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the 1993 Venice Biennale. He exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago before his untimely death in 1996 to AIDS-related illness.

Dimensions: H 197cm x W 98cm x D 4.5cm

Presented in a new submerged white frame.