Crosstown Traffic

Christopher Wool | New York

Arts New York Christopher Wool painting

Location: Two Manhattan West, 375 9th Avenue, New York, NY 10001

About the Artwork

Whether via painting, drawing, sculpture or photography, Christopher Wool’s artistic practice often involves the translation of images from one medium to another. It is through this process of translation that Wool’s work takes on extraordinary complexity and depth, and confronts the core qualities of art.

For Manhattan West, Wool produced his first public commission and his largest work to date, in a medium entirely new to the artist: mosaic. The reference for Crosstown Traffic (2023) was a small-scale painting on paper, which Wool, with the assistance of artisans in a studio outside of Venice, Italy, translated into a monumental 28 x 39-foot expanse of stone and glass. The change in scale and transformation of the medium are key to the artwork, which commands the lobby of Two Manhattan West.

Crosstown Traffic, 2023

Mosaic

28 x 39 feet

Image by Timothy Schenck

About Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool is widely regarded as one of the preeminent American artists of his generation. He was born in 1955, grew up in Chicago, and moved to New York City in the early 1970s. Since the 1980s, Wool has forged an agile, highly focused practice that employs a variety of processes and mediums, with a particular focus on pushing abstract painting’s limits. His creative output, which also incorporates photography, sculpture, artist books, and printmaking, addresses contemporary experience through formal invention.

Wool’s work has been presented at museums around the world. Among the institutions that have held major solo exhibitions of his work are the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Art Institute of Chicago. Wool’s work is included in numerous noteworthy international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome; Artist in Residence at DAAD, Berlin and Chianti Foundation, Marfa; and a recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize.

Learn more at wool735.com.