Untitled
Christopher Wool
American, born 1955
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.
Medium
Enamel on aluminum
Dimensions
9' x 6' (274.3 x 182.9 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc.
Accession
235.1991
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions