For his first gallery show in seven years, Christopher Wool debuts new paintings and sculptures, the latter representing a medium he’s only explored in recent years. Wool, of course, first gained renown in the mid-1980s with enamel paintings featuring quotes from movies in bold letters. Since then, he’s been recycling motifs, including some from his own previous work, into cool, deskilled, unexpectedly lyrical art. The compositions here feature Rorschach blot forms—some resembling branches, others Janus-like heads—taken from drawings originally made in 1986.
While these huge, silkscreened canvases are divided bilaterally, they each reproduce only half of the source drawing they’re based on. What’s left is sometimes paired with a blank panel, half of an altogether different drawing, or a jumble of enlarged letter forms. Some paintings include dense overlays of black, silkscreened reproductions of roller marks, or real ones applied in white paint. They block or subvert any interpretation of the blots and, perhaps by extension, Wool’s art.
The sculptures consist of enormous welded bronze scribbles modeled on found tangles of wire. While they’re big enough and obvious enough to seem consequential, they feel inert. They fall short of the paintings, which bristle with anxiety, intention and even humor.—Anne Doran