Tag: See Stop Run

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Christopher Wool’s winning gambit

Contributed by Adam Simon / I’ve known Christopher Wool for a long time, since we were both teenage students at the New York Studio School in the 1970s. Philip Guston made annual visits and I remember his indignation at being asked to look at Christopher’s work. I believe he said that Wool’s all-over paintings should have been shown to someone like Larry Poons, not to him. In retrospect, Guston’s dismay seems to have been prescient and a little ironic. Wool’s breakout text paintings in the 1980s produced a similar response among painters as Guston’s cartoonish figure paintings had a decade earlier. Both overturned current orthodoxies.