Dates: Nov 26 – Dec 25, 2004

“A street level vision of the world seems to permeate Wool’s work. This is partially attributable to the tension between accident and intention set up by his paintings, which cannot help but feel intrinsically urban…The spills and drips, smudges and smears that punctuate his paintings echo the degraded surroundings that appear through his vast photographic work East Broadway Breakdown…”
Katrina M. Brown, 2003

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition with New York based artist Christopher Wool. The gallery exhibition will be the artist’s first in Japan since 1997. Christopher Wool’s work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions including, most recently, William Gedney-Christopher Wool : Into the Night, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island (2004), Christopher Wool, Camden Arts Centre, London (2004), Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, Lyon (2003), Crosstown Crosstown, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee / Le Consortium, Dijon (2003 / 2002) and Secession, Vienna (2001).The Taka Ishii Gallery exhibition will consist of a selection of new paintings and works on paper as well as the photographic series East Broadway Breakdown (1994-95/ 2002).

Christopher Wool’s most recent paintings are comprised of sprays, stains, painted erasures and stretches of rolled paint. In some instances the painting’s imagery is silkscreend onto the canvas – the imagery derived from a portion of an older painting or one of Wool’s present works-in progress. In all instances elements that would typically be ignored, treated as “mistakes” or tangential, are placed in the painting’s foreground. A distinction between the painting as a primary, unique, non-reproducible object and the “degraded,” secondary image of the photograph or photocopy is denied as elements of paintings are reproduced in subsequent works.

An explicit connection between painting and photography is made in Wool’s recent exhibitions and artists’s books. An exhibition at the Vienna Secession included a series of polaroid images of the artists’ s paintings in the studio – some works hanging, others propped up, leaning casually against the wall. Wool’s publication Incident on 9th Street consists entirely of of photographic images documenting the artists’s studio – post fire. Taka Ishii Gallery will exhibit East Broadway Breakdown, a set of 160 black and white ink jet prints – a collection of impressions captured on the walk from Wool’s studio in the Lower East Side to Chinatown, New York.

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