Since the late 1970s, Christopher Wool has readdressed and expanded the process of painting. In 9th Street Run Down he creates a complex fiction out of 44 large works on paper all made over the past year. Wool started these "painted silkscreens" as studio sketches after his retrospective exhibits in Los Angeles, Basel, Pittsburgh and Geneva. It was immediately clear that they would become an outstanding grouping of works embodying a special "narrative" that is very much a part of Wool's work. As the critic Neville Wakefield has written, "to spend time amongst [Wool's] art is something akin to being caught in the compulsive and circular absurdity of a Beckett play. The characters within a painting state their case with a simple and irrefutable logic. 'A painting of a painting is still a painting,' Wool insists, after all. And yet like Beckett's Godot, its importance, let alone its existence, may well be something that can never be quite confirmed. Wool offers no reassurances to the contrary. But in his own tireless vigil he brings to the activity particular and extraordinary worth."
