Christopher Wool tries to combine the energy of a bad boy with the influence of a sure thing

In 1997, Christopher Wool published Incident on 9th Streeta collection of photographs he took of his studio while claiming compensation for fire damage. His realistic shots show blown-out windows, a collapsed ceiling and torn-out floorboards. Documents and equipment are strewn everywhere. Yet in one of the photographs, two of Wool’s paintings lean against a wall, remarkably intact amid the rubble.

The exhibition See Stop Run, held in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily presents the last decade of Wool’s work, though his practice dates back to the 1980s. The show features photographs of the paintings intact—a chronological exception but a fitting inclusion given the exhibition’s installation in a gutted, unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. A decade after his stenciled words, florals, and spray-painted scribbles filled the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum, the artist has placed his work in a decidedly less manicured setting, one that recalls the decay of his fire-ravaged studio and revives the punk ethos of his early days.

In the large U-shaped room, coiled cables hang from the ceiling. Uneven, partially demolished floors reveal decorative pink and black tiles, and workers have marked the walls with sooty handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled mathematical equations, and profane doodles. The many windows offer visitors impressive views of Lower Manhattan and fill the space with natural light, but continuous wall space is lacking. As a result, Wool has hung works sporadically on hole-riddled columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted, and unfinished walls. A framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hangs above a multitude of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as proof of authentication, or even out of legal obligation.

The property only became available to Wool in a post-COVID market that has dampened demand for office space. Far from being a typical tenant, the artist still spent considerable capital to lease the space and bring it up to code; he even had to incorporate in order to “lend” his own works to the show. Historically, emerging artists and burgeoning institutions have capitalized on depressed economies to exhibit in unconventional spaces. But financial concerns were not a motivating factor for Wool, an artist of considerable means and privilege, whose art dealers were likely competing to exhibit (and sell) his work. The goal, according to an accompanying essay by curator Anne Pontégnie, was to “break away from the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”

This strategy might seem contrived—an artist exploiting the aesthetics of ruin to accentuate the rawness of his own work—if it were not so consistent with his process. Wool has long sought to question the integrity of his images, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that defies clarity and order, he once again tests the resilience and adaptability of his art.

Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, obscuration, scaling, distortion, and collage to generate new images from pre-existing works, circling backwards while tilting forwards. This is not immediately apparent in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though some forms and patterns echo each other throughout. Many of the paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” blots that Wool made with enamel in 1986 (not on display). Between 2020 and 2023, Wool painted over digitally altered inkjet prints of these silhouette-like blots. A group of ten hangs in a grid on one of the few walls the artist added, but there is a sense that he has generated endless variations from random images. In turn, one of the first paintings in the series, Untitled (2020), served as the basis for a pair of large screen prints, both Untitled (2023). Nearly identical, the oversized spots greet visitors as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s ability to produce difference through repetition.

A highlight of the exhibition is the series of gnarled sculptures that Wool has fashioned over the past decade from chicken wire and fencing scavenged around his Marfa, Texas, home, though they too often disappear into the chaotic surroundings. The jumbled metal debris evokes weeds, but Wool achieves an impressive diversity of form. His early sculptures, Untitled (2013) is a surprisingly graceful tangle of rusty barbed wire hanging at eye level like a low chandelier. Untitled (2019) is an unruly, twisted mass of wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact, like densely woven nests. One of several that Wool enlarged and cast in copper-plated pink bronze, Untitled (2021) perches precariously on a pedestal – a dancer in mid-pirouette. Bad bunny (2022), Wool photocopied images of her wire formations to heighten contrast and flatten the sculptures, enhancing their relationship to her painted line.

The painted and sculpted lines of wool converge in a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Translated from a 2021 oil painting on paper, itself a rework of an earlier screenprint, the square stones and glass mimic the pixelated distortion of the digitized source. Eleven feet tall, it stretches from floor to ceiling and appears to have been custom-made for the site (it wasn’t). Further uptown, in another office building—Two Manhattan West—is Wool’s first mosaic. The same but much larger Traffic through the city (2023) towers over visitors in the cavernous lobby of the gleaming new complex, demonstrating that the artist also knows how to pander to the wealthy elite. The version included in this exhibition is much more humble: the cloud of swirling black, white, and dirty pink fits better with the tumult of this transitional space. Matching the hues of the venue’s exposed tiles, the mosaic appears to have been unearthed during construction.

Wool could easily have mounted this show in one of New York’s burgeoning galleries (two years ago, he showed many of his works in Xavier Hufken’s brand-new gallery in Brussels). But the raw, ready-made nature of the venue suits the deliberately raw energy of his work. Ultimately, the exposed innards of the architecture draw our attention to the many layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried beneath layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—an accumulated history of images.