Christopher Wool is back in London, marking a significant moment in his career, a convergence of everything that defines his restless practice. The show brings together more than fifty works on paper, sculpture, and print from the past several years. It is Wool’s largest presentation since 2004 and his third collaboration with the gallery, bridging the momentum of his recent self-curated projects in New York and Marfa.
In an era still debating the relevance of abstraction, Wool continues to test its elasticity. His art is an ongoing negotiation between creation and erasure, gesture and control. What emerges in these new works is less a reaffirmation of past methods than an evolved lexicon of repetition, layering, and visual interference. Every surface bears evidence of hesitation paint dragged, wiped, or dissolved into ghostly traces.
Wool’s works on paper form the exhibition’s centre of gravity. They map his evolving dialogue with the mechanics of reproduction. In the early 1990s, he began silkscreening his own imagery, reapplying and distorting his marks to destabilise the very notion of originality. That logic persists here, but with greater complexity. Images are multiplied, folded into one another, then obscured beneath haze and pastel washes. The greys and whites of earlier decades give way to subdued chromatic flickers of pink, mint, ochre that hint at emotional undertones without ever conceding sentimentality.
Turpentine drags across the paper in a gesture of removal as expressive as the initial act of painting. Wool has long resisted the painter’s hierarchy of mark-making, preferring the creation of feedback loops through obliteration. Each work suggests an internal rhythm, a pulse of repetition that refuses resolution.
Across the gallery, a group of six sculptures, two monumental and four intimate, extends that same language into three dimensions. Their looping, irregular forms recall the fluid energy of his line work, rendered here in copper-plated steel and bronze. The sculptures’ origins lie in the desert topography of West Texas, where Wool has lived and worked for over a decade. What began as found material—discarded fencing, wire, fragments of ranch debris—has been transformed into sinuous abstractions that retain a sense of raw immediacy. Welds and seams remain visible, refusing polish, and grounding these objects firmly in the artist’s hand.
Printmaking, too, remains central to Wool’s recent output. Two series of etchings, produced in 2021 and 2023, are shown together for the first time. The latter, Defenestration Suite, was conceived to accompany What Just Happened (2023), a collection of poems by Richard Hell, Wool’s long-time collaborator. These etchings collapse the divide between word and image: text fragments tumble into abstract forms, language reduced to its visual residue.
The London exhibition also resonates with Wool’s recent Marfa project, See Stop Run West Texas, a sweeping survey of the past decade of his work, installed in a repurposed industrial space and complemented by three large outdoor sculptures. A 400-page volume documenting the show will be released later this year, offering an extended look into his ongoing exploration of space, repetition, and the shifting boundaries between mediums.
At his current London show, those concerns coalesce into a single statement. Wool’s abstraction, once seen as an act of defiance against painting’s conventions, now reads as a meditation on endurance. Through layering, deletion, and reconstruction, he demonstrates that meaning can still surface from repetition—and that in the noise of modern image culture, silence itself can be a gesture.
For London, this is a reminder of Wool’s position at the fault line between gesture and reproduction, control and collapse. In his world, nothing is stable, but everything feels alive with the residue of making.
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, 13 October – 19 December 2025