Christopher Wool

In the photographs that make up Bad Rabbit, Christopher Wool (born 1955) works with pieces of fencing wire that he found on the roads and littered backyards of Marfa, Texas. Their shapes reminded him of his own drawing line, and so he explored their sculptural qualities in a series of starkly black-and-white, digitally treated prints. For his sculptural practice, the artist enlarges the wire maquettes and casts them in bronze and steel; in the photo works collected here, the found object becomes a subject of observation, its sculptural form created in its framing and in the subsequent treatment of the images. This is the fifth artist’s book in a series by Wool from the same publisher, which has become an important part of the artist’s practice. The book comes in an edition of 1,200, each copy signed by the artist.

Following his previous limited editions with Holzwarth Publications, Road, Yard and Westtexaspsychosculpture (all published in 2017), New York–based artist Christopher Wool (born 1955) presents Swamp, a beautiful, slipcased, large-format (10 x 15 inches) paperback volume that likewise features images that have been created through processing and reproduction, in which the original photographic material acts as only the basic layer.

Here, what initially appears as an unruly surface gives way to Wool's black-and-brown photographic superimpositions, fragments of motifs: backyards, abandoned car tires, huge cable drums, dead tree stumps, rusty bed frames or the wall of a shack with strange objects leaning against it.

Published in an edition of 1,200, each copy is signed by the artist and dated 2019.

This book documents Christopher Wool’s (born 1955) 2017 exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie Max Hetzler, at the center of which is a torso made out of pigmented concrete, surrounded by large-scale paintings and works on paper in which Wool works through his own oeuvre and references from art history. The book also contains exhibition shots by Wool and comes with a dust jacket that unfolds to reveal a poster designed by the artist.

In this artist's book, Christopher Wool (born 1955) layers photos of backyard debris and dusty roads, of Texan wilderness and scenes rife with sculptural properties. Two realities invade each other and their overlapping actualities collapse into an artistic reality beyond the moment caught by the artist's camera. Thus the pictures are imbued with the history of their own making. For Yard, Wool has resampled photographic images that appeared in the previous artist's books Road and Westtexaspsychosculpture, also available from Holzwarth Publications. The book is published in an edition of 1,200 copies, all signed by the artist.

It collects photographs taken by the artist between 2015 and 2017—dust roads, gravel roads, roads partly overgrown or full of tire tracks, roads through desert and fields of rocks, through sparse woods and along precipices. Wool’s roads are not purposeful trajectories toward destinations but the roads of perpetual, endless motion for motion’s sake. In Wool’s black-and-white photographs, only seldom does a fork in the road offer the viewer an apparent choice of which way to go. And though each photograph comes from a different location, the place changing from one shot to the next, it still feels like one long road traveled under the clear light of the sun.

Christopher Wool: Road is available in a limited edition of 1,200 copies, all signed by the artist.

These are pictures of found situations, rendered serendipitous by the power of the artist’s photographic vision: pictures of backyard debris and improvised storage solutions, stray animals and strange constructions that once must have made sense but now appear undecipherable. Things set adrift and excerpts from the landscape that appear almost like sculpture for the split second of the open lens.

Christopher Wool: Westtexaspsychosculpture is published in an edition of 1,200 copies, signed by the artist.