Untitled

Christopher Wool

1990

A large enamel-on-aluminum painting in which Christopher Wool arranges oversized stenciled black letters into a broken, cryptic phrase that turns reading into a visual, repetitive gesture.

Towering, cut-apart letters sit in stark black on white; their stenciled gaps and tight vertical columns create a mechanical, staccato rhythm that makes the text feel both familiar and unreadable.

Wool’s text paintings helped move late-20th-century painting toward language and appropriation, bringing the blunt forms of stencils, graffiti, and advertising into fine art and reshaping how words function as visual imagery.

Palette

Art Terms

Painting Enamel paint Stencil Typography Appropriation Monochrome

Exhibitions

Works from Change, Inc.

1974

American Prints, 1960–1985

1987

Contemporary Works from the Collection

1987

Christopher Wilmarth

1989