Collection: Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool (born 1955, Chicago) is an American artist whose work since the mid-1980s has centred on painting, photography, and works on paper that test the limits of language, image, and surface. He is best known for his large-scale enamel text paintings — words stencilled in black capital letters onto white aluminium panels, compressed, fragmented, and interrupted so that language becomes simultaneously readable and obstructed. Works such as Apocalypse Now (1988) and Prankster (c. 1988) established Wool as a central figure in the post-conceptual painting of the late 1980s and early 1990s, working at the intersection of graphic design, punk culture, Concrete Poetry, and the legacy of abstract expressionism.

Wool’s practice engages the materiality of language: letters treated as graphic mass, rhythm, and interruption rather than transparent carriers of meaning. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. A major retrospective was held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2013. His paintings are held in major public and private collections worldwide.

This collection brings together exhibition ephemera and printed matter connected to Wool’s practice and institutional presentations.