Christopher Wool with Richard Schiff

Though the facts of Christopher Wool’s career are well known, the implications of his innovative aesthetic process remain open to critical speculation. For this interview, along with Rail Publisher Phong Bui, I visited a new installation of See Stop Run, an exhibition Wool previously organized in Lower Manhattan on a vacant floor of a commercial office building at 101 Greenwich Street. The works can now be seen at the Brite Building in Marfa, Texas, where we met on March 29, 2026.

As technically complex as Christopher Wool’s images are—rather hi-tech, all in all—they seem to address vision at a rudimentary level, as if to see this work was to see something never seen before, despite similarities to blots, stains, abrasions, and the like. Or, in the case of sculpture, similarities to urban or ranch land scrap, abused and ephemeral, devoid of recyclable value. I think of these works as lessons in vision or visual acuity that yield no summary instruction. The lessons of Christopher Wool’s art cannot be conveyed other than through direct experience of the work, piece by piece, all products of creative intuition. Through photographing, screenprinting, digital printing, painting, and digitally-engineered casting, Wool’s art transforms a blot or a length of bent wire into a viscerally compelling image. To find an analogy to the Wool experience, I try to imagine what it might be like to encounter a first photograph after having become familiar with lithographic printing or to encounter a first video screen after having become familiar with photography. There are similarities between the media and yet each opens to a new sensory world. Perhaps Wool’s art reveals the fundamental hybridity and interconnection of all image-generating media. When I see his sculpture, I recall his photography; when I see his photography, I recall his printmaking and painting. Without verbalization, his art defines what an image can be, while it demonstrates that the definition itself is flexible.

Read full interview at brooklynrail.org.