Guggenheim Museum Presents Major Survey of American Artist Christopher Wool, Opening October 25

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1 Guggenheim Museum Presents Major Survey of American Artist, Opening October 25 Most Expansive Retrospective to Date Includes Paintings, Photographs, and Works on Paper from the Mid-1980s through the Present Exhibition: Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York Location: Full rotunda and ramps, High Gallery, Annex Level 7 Dates: October 25, 2013 January 22, 2014 Media Preview: Thursday, October 24, 10 am 1 pm (NEW YORK, NY September 5, 2013) From October 25, 2013, through January 22, 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents a retrospective of American artist, assembling the most comprehensive examination to date of his rigorous oeuvre. Featuring approximately 90 paintings, photographs, and works on paper, explores developments across the artist s influential career, from his early uses of appropriated patterns and text to recent abstract works created through collage, erasure, and digital manipulation. The exhibition is organized by Katherine Brinson, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Following its presentation in New York, will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago from February 23 through May 11, is generously supported by Guggenheim Partners, LLC. Major support is provided by the Leadership Committee for the exhibition: Danielle and David Ganek, Chairs; Luhring Augustine, New York; The Brant Foundation, Inc.; Thompson Dean Family Foundation; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Gagosian Gallery; and Zadig & Voltaire. Additional Leadership Committee gifts are provided by The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Marguerite Steed Hoffman; Brett and Dan Sundheim; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill; Agnes and Edward Lee; Nina and Frank Moore; Nancy and Woody Ostrow; Elham and Tony Salame; Cynthia and Abe Steinberger; Jennifer and David Stockman; Christen Sveaas; and David Teiger.

2 This exhibition is also supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional funding provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. Exhibition Overview Since his emergence in the 1980s, has forged an agile, highly focused practice that ranges across processes and mediums, paying special attention to the complexities of painting. Each new work is a site of restless experimentation in which Wool continually disrupts and renews the terms of his artistic production. This survey will fill the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and an adjacent gallery with a rich selection of largely monochrome paintings, works on paper, and photographs. With the exception of two galleries at the starting and ending points of the installation that will intersperse works from different periods, the exhibition will unfold along loosely chronological lines, presenting an overview of pivotal developments in the artist s career. Wool was born in 1955 and grew up in Chicago. By the early 1970s he had settled in New York City, where the anarchic, interdisciplinary energy of the punk and No Wave scenes were a defining influence on his creative development. In the subsequent decade, he set out to explore the possibilities of painting at a time when many considered the medium outmoded and irrelevant to avant-garde practice. The exhibition begins with a group of 1987 pattern paintings that represent a key breakthrough for Wool. These works use paint rollers incised with floral and geometric designs to transfer all-over patterns in severe black enamel to a white ground. Collapsing any distinction between the physical process of making the painting and its visual content, these everyday tools provided the artist with a repertoire of readymade imagery that avoided both spontaneous gesture and self-conscious compositional decisions. Instead, the works focus attention on the small failures that occur within this mechanized framework, allowing breakdowns and slippages in the patterns to accrue a delicate emotional resonance. During the same period, Wool initiated a body of work that similarly subverted a set of existing forms, this time taking language as his appropriated subject matter. Rendering a word or phrase in bold, blocky stencils arrayed across a geometric grid, he preserved the specific form and order of the language but freely stripped out punctuation, disrupted conventional spacing, and removed letters. The resulting works oscillate between verbal communication and pure formalism, their structural dissonance reflecting the state of anxiety and agitation conjured by the texts themselves. Wool s word paintings will be exhibited on the museum s ramps alongside examples of his rollered and stamped pattern works. Notable examples will include Apocalypse Now, the 1988 painting presenting the phrase SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS, and the full suite of the 1989 Black Book Drawings, 22 works on paper enumerating negative character types such as TERRORIST, PARANOIAC, and HYPOCRITE. From the early 1990s through the present, the silkscreen has been a primary tool in Wool s practice. In the earliest examples of his screenprinted paintings, Wool expanded on the vocabulary of his pattern works, isolating their stylized floral motifs to use as near-abstract units of composition. Frequently in this period, the artist sabotaged his existing forms as a way to covertly generate new ones, layering the flower icons in dense, overlapping configurations that congeal into a single black mass or are obscured with passages of brusque overpainting. A number of works created in 1995 evidence Wool s

3 introduction of a new, wholly freehand gesture in the form of a looping line applied with a spray gun an irreverent interruption of the imagery below that evokes an act of vandalism on a city street. Wool s attraction to the bleak poetics of the urban margins was amplified in his first major photography series, Absent Without Leave (1993), which will be exhibited in depth for the first time in this presentation. The work comprises images taken during a period of largely solitary foreign travels, in Europe and elsewhere. Saturated with alienation and shot without any concern for technical refinement, the raw contingency of these vignettes was intensified when Wool transformed them into black-andwhite photocopies. The same mood of disaffection pervades a parallel body of photographic work titled East Broadway Breakdown ( /2002), but in this series Wool focused on a more familiar journey his nightly walk home from his East Village studio. Highlighting the city s unadorned, off-hours existence, the images depict a nocturnal landscape emptied of citizens and stripped down to a skeleton of streetlamps, chain-link fences, blemished sidewalks, and parked cars. The exhibition will examine the critical conceptual shift that occurred in Wool s practice in the late 1990s when he began to purloin his previous creative output as material for new, autonomous works. He would take an image of a finished picture, transpose it to a silkscreen, and then reassign it wholesale to a fresh canvas. In works such as He Said She Said (2001), the original image is left untouched after these acts of self-appropriation, although uncannily transformed by the process of mechanical reproduction. At other times, Wool manually reworks his silkscreened doubles, adding new rollered paint (Untitled, 2001) or sprayed enamel (Last Year Halloween Fell on a Weekend, 2004) to create disorienting hybrids that entwine recycled and original gestures. Over the past decade, Wool s simultaneous embrace and repression of painting s expressive potential have culminated in an open-ended body of work he calls his gray paintings. In these large-scale abstractions, Wool alternates the act of erasing with the act of drawing, repeatedly wiping away sprayed black enamel paint with a rag to create layers of tangled lines and hazy washes. The artist describes the cycle of composition and loss inherent to this process as an attempt to harness the condition of doubt as a generative creative force. The same challenge to the authority of the unique, original gesture is extended in a group of canvases in which Wool uses digital processing to distort the scale, color, and resolution of his painted marks, often merging them with details from other paintings. A single work might synthesize the traces of multiple past moments of creation, with images returning in new guises to be considered afresh within Wool s evolving pictorial investigations. Exhibition Catalogue A richly illustrated catalogue with a cover specially designed by the artist will accompany the exhibition. It will feature a critical overview of the artist s career by exhibition curator Katherine Brinson and the most authoritative exhibition history and bibliography of Wool s career yet compiled. In addition, the catalogue will include scholarly essays by Suzanne Hudson, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Southern California, and James Rondeau, Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair and Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a text by the artist Richard Prince. A hardcover edition priced at $55 distributed by D.A.P. will be available at the museum store and online at Guggenheimstore.org.

4 Education and Public Programs Complete information about the range of public programs presented in conjunction with Christopher Wool is posted on guggenheim.org/publicprograms. Highlights include: Performance Nation Time Curated by John Corbett and Wed, Nov 20, 7 pm On the occasion of the exhibition, an international cast including writer Richard Hell, musician and composer Arto Lindsay, Scandinavian free jazz band The Thing, and legendary multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee will come together for an explosive night of art and performance. $30, $25 members, $10 students. For tickets and more information, visit guggenheim.org/calendar. Eye to Eye: Artist-Led Tours Private gallery tours of led by contemporary artists. Receptions follow. Mon, Nov 4, 6:30 pm: Josh Smith Mon, Dec 9, 6:30 pm: Matt Keegan Wed, Jan 8, 6:30 pm: Alex Hubbard $20, $15 members, $10 students. For more information, visit guggenheim.org/calendar. Symposium Fri, Jan 17, 2 pm This daylong symposium brings together international scholars, curators, and artists in a series of presentations and panel discussions addressing questions of painting and abstraction from the 1980s to the present. Organized by Katherine Brinson and Suzanne Hudson. $15, $10 members, free for students with RSVP. For tickets and more information, visit guggenheim.org/calendar. Curator s Eye Tours Fri, Nov 8, 2 pm: Melinda Lang, Curatorial Research Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Fri, Nov 22, 2 pm: Katherine Brinson Free with museum admission Conservator s Eye Tour Fri, Jan. 17, 2 pm: Julie Barten, Senior Conservator, Exhibitions and Collections, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum About Born in Boston in 1955 and raised in Chicago, Wool has lived and worked in New York City since 1973, dividing his time between there and Marfa, Texas, since His work has been presented at institutions around the world, including solo exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1989); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1991); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh ( ), and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (1999); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Spain, and Musée d Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France

5 (2006); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto ( ), and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2009); and Musée d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012). Wool has also participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York (1989), Documenta, Kassel (1992), the Lyon Biennial (2003), and the Venice Biennale (2011). Among many honors, he has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, served as a DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence, and received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize Cologne. About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The Guggenheim network that began in the 1970s when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, was joined by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, has since expanded to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, currently in development. Looking to the future, the Guggenheim Foundation continues to forge international collaborations that take contemporary art, architecture, and design beyond the walls of the museum. More information about the foundation can be found at guggenheim.org. VISITOR INFORMATION Admission: Adults $22, students/seniors (65+) $18, members and children under 12 free. Available with admission or by download to personal devices, the Guggenheim s new, free app offers an enhanced visitor experience. The app features content on special exhibitions, including, as well as access to more than 1,200 works in the Guggenheim s permanent collection and information about the museum s landmark building. A verbal imaging guide for the collection will also be available for visitors who are blind or have low vision. The Guggenheim app is sponsored by Bloomberg. Museum Hours: Sun Wed, 10 am 5:45 pm; Fri, 10 am 5:45 pm; Sat, 10 am 7:45 pm; closed Thurs. On Saturdays, beginning at 5:45 pm, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information, call or visit the museum online at: guggenheim.org guggenheim.org/connect For publicity images, visit guggenheim.org/pressimages User ID: photoservice Password: presspass #1313 September 20, 2013 (Updated from September 5) FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT Betsy Ennis, Director of Media and Public Relations Lauren Van Natten, Associate Director, Media and Public Relations

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7 Press Images October 25, 2013 January 22, 2014 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Online Photo Service for Press Images Images for current exhibitions may be downloaded free of charge through our Web site. Visit guggenheim.org/press-images Enter the following username and password: Username: photoservice Password: presspass Select the desired exhibition All images cleared for press are available in either jpeg or tiff format. All images are accompanied by full caption and copyright information. The publication of images is permitted only for press purposes and with the corresponding credit lines. Images may not be cropped, detailed, overprinted, or altered. with any questions. Untitled, 1987 Enamle and flashe on aluminum, x cm Trouble, 1989 Enamel and acrylic on aluminium, x cm 1

8 Absent Without Leave (DAAD, 1993), black-and-white photocopies, 21.6 x 27.9 cm East Broadway Breakdown, / inkjet prints, 21.6 x 27.9 cm each, edition of 3 East Broadway Breakdown, / inkjet prints, 21.6 x 27.9 cm each, edition of 3 Untitled, 1994 Enamel on linen, x cm 2

9 Untitled, 2000 Enamel on aluminum, x cm Untitled, 2000 Silkscreen ink on linen, x cm Minor Mishap, 2001 Silkscreen ink on linen, x cm Untitled, 2001 Silkscreen ink on linen, x cm 3

10 Untitled, 2010 Enamel on linen, x cm 4