Christopher Wool is an American artist best known for his large-scale paintings of black stenciled letters on white canvases, featuring words or phrases that are often alliterative, ironic, or provocative. Challenging traditional conventions of painting, Wool combines a wide range of techniques in his practice, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen-printing. He creates depth and tension in his compositions through meticulous layering, adding and removing elements throughout the process, obscuring traces of previously visible parts. Defined as much by what they reveal as what they conceal, Wool’s works demonstrates his ongoing inquiry into the complexities of painting. According to Wool, “I think of myself primarily as an abstract painter, but I find that in making paintings there is a little bit of investigation into what abstract painting can be.”

–From the Glenstone Field Guide