Despite the periodic ringing of the death knell for painting, this genre of art-making is alive and well. One reason for its continued relevance is that it has gotten tougher and smarter in true Darwinian fashion. Painters are bound to the traditions they inherit and know that in order to keep painting alive, push it forward, and agitate for its legitimacy, they must find ways to connect it to our times. Chicago native Christopher Wool has been a leading figure in this struggle, and over the course of a 30-plus year career, he has given painting a solid roughing up, challenging its rules, biases, and cherished truths, delivering it to the free and fertile territory that it currently finds itself in today. Wool first came to attention in the 1980s for aligning fine art painting with sign painting in stenciled text works. He went on to besmirch it further by using techniques more common in home decorating such as rolling stencil-like floral patterns on his surfaces. More recently, he has been making paintings as much by wiping away paint as by adding it, and his methods have become very reliant on photography, computers, and screen printing to usher forth works that are entangled in a web of reproduction and permutation. All along, the artist’s hand—the central protagonist in modern gestural painting from John Singer Sargent to Jackson Pollock to John Currin—has come into question in Wool’s work. His paintings suggest a skepticism about the role of the handmade as an indicator of artistic genius or authenticity, a doubt that has found an outlet in his screen prints, stencils, and spray-painting, all the while complicated by the swiping on and wiping away that one also finds in his canvases. This ambivalence toward the hand inspired the title of this exhibition, Phantom Limb: Christopher Wool and Painting Now, which brings together a wide cross-section of Wool’s own work, alongside work by predecessors, peers, and a younger generation working in his wake.
Drawn primarily from the MCA Collection but augmented with works from the Chicago community, the exhibition shows that a skepticism about how painterly gestures are made is a concern that dates back decades. This concern was shared by early adopters of the silk-screen process in the 1960s such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, pioneers who have become so central to Wool and others. Across the Atlantic, artists such as Sigmar Polke, who likewise combined the handpainted and the printed, further complicated his provocations by using patterned fabrics instead of pristine canvas. More recently, a new generation of artists, who have built on these breakthroughs, keeping a critical eye on the romance of the hand in painting, has come to public attention. By using printing techniques, staining, spraying, and other methods, artists as diverse as Wade Guyton, Sergej Jensen, and Sterling Ruby, to name just a few, extend these ideas into the present, connecting them with new concerns and conditions. As in the medical sense of the term, a phantom limb may not be in evidence any longer but its owner still feels its presence, haunted by it and the instinctive urge to use it. In much the same way, painters today, perhaps perversely, find ways to maintain a critical distance to the hand, even though its presence is hard to deny.
