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Who

Wool became famous in the 1980s for his "word paintings." It's a cross between poetry and art, and you can't afford it.

Backstory

In the early '80s Wool, a Chicago native, was working in his studio in Chinatown when he saw the words "sex" and "luv" spray-painted on a white truck parked outside his window. He stenciled the words in black on a white canvas, and voila: a work of art. Wool's first show took place at New York's Cable Gallery in 1984. Since then, he's continued to work in the same vein, taking bits of pop culture—such as lyrics from George Clinton or lines from Apocalypse Now—and breaking them up into visual patterns. (He occasionally plays around with even more abstract styles, often inspired by graffiti.) Over the course of his 20-year career, his work has been on display at museums worldwide, from the NYC MoMA to London's Tate. He's represented by Chelsea's Luhring Augustine in New York and by Larry Gagosian in LA.

Of note

Prices for Wool's work really shot into the stratosphere following his 1998 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A year later, Thea Westreich convinced client Robert Soros (the son of George Soros) to pay more than $600,000—six times the previous record—for one of his pieces, a move that inaugurated him as a "must-have" for collectors. Wool's work has only gotten pricier: In 2005, a painting featuring the words "run dog run dog run" sold for $1.25 million at auction. A year later, Aby Rosen snagged a 1990 work—stenciled with "run dog eat dog"—for $1.08 million. The most that anyone's paid for a Christopher Wool? At a 2006 Sotheby's auction, his Untitled (P80) Helter Skelter was nabbed for $1.4 million by Dominique Levy and Bob Mnuchin.

For the record

Although it was his MOCA show in LA that ignited the Wool feeding frenzy, he's never had many fans on the Left Coast. "Christopher Wool is the New York painter West Coast critics love to hate—and I mean hate," Jerry Saltz wrote in the Village Voice in 2004, pointing out that he hadn't received a single positive review from an LA-based art critic in a decade.

Personal

Wool and his wife, artist Charlene von Heyl, live on East 9th Street.