For an artist who has been working the art circuit for as long as Christopher Wool, it's easy to understand the desire to take a step back—or a step up.
Wool has pulled this off with tremendous success with See Stop Run (14 March–31 July 2024), a survey of his works from the past decade, co-curated with Anne Pontégnie.
'The starting point of See Stop Run was a desire to escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces, galleries, and institutions and to look for a place in NYC that would allow Wool's work to interact with something other than a blank slate,' Pontégnie said.
That place is the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich, a 1908 Beaux Arts-style office building a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
The 18,000-square-foot space is filled with the American artist's barbed wire sculptures, photographs, paintings, works on paper, and a mosaic, with every work throughout the site initiated by a reproduction of a previous work.
One work on view is a shrunken iteration of Crosstown Traffic (2023), Wool's large-scale stone and glass mosaic that was installed at Two Manhattan West in June last year. While the large-scale paintings in this exhibition can be traced back to a past small monotype, a print, or a drawing.
The copper pipes that map the ceiling and the exposed, roughly plastered walls triumphantly frame Wool's knotted wire sculptures and his raw, gestural paintings—a practice that has always been an affiliated to the punk scene in New York revealed in an aesthetic that embraces the grittier, darker side of urban life.
Images: Exhibition view: Christopher Wool, See Stop Run, 101 Greenwich Street, New York (14 March–31 July 2024). Courtesy Christopher Wool.
