Christopher Wool: Luhring Augustine

GALLERIES-CHELSEA

Christopher Wool

How hard can it be to make inky messes and random tangles? Gruellingly so, for Wool, to a point where degrees of difficulty create meaning. This show picks up where the artist's Guggenheim retrospective, in 2013, left off, with paintings derived from Rorschach patterns and sculptures based on snarls of fencing wire that he found outdoors in Marfa, Texas. (There are also delicately scrawled etchings.) In black enamel and layered silkscreen, the paintings are desultory palimpsests of exacting decisions. For the sculptures, Wool made 3-D prints of the wire, blown up to plumbing-pipe thickness, and then cast them in bronze. (The weight-bearing parts are in copper-plated stainless steel.) The more arbitrary the look of Wool's art becomes, the more it dramatizes his ferocious will to make it. Through June 20.

(Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St. 212-206-9100.)