The London exhibition, held towards the end of 2025, showcases the culmination of Christopher Woll’s unique abstraction process. Using a complex construction technique, the artist draws layers of abstract stains into an intense and continuous expression, achieving a dynamic abstraction that explores a harmonious unity of colour within a grey-pink spectrum. With the support of digital techniques, he further differentiates his abstraction experiment around an anti-painting concept on a surface that is added to, erased or partially abraded. The soft transitions and layered images transferred onto the paper surface should also be considered the final stage of the visual language design or discussion evaluated within this scope.

internal forms defined by rhythmic curves

In this exhibition, Woll also presents his sculptural practice, which emerged as a spontaneous experience shaped by references to the natural environment of Marfa, where he lived in the 2010s. Moving from images reminiscent of sculptural arrangements captured in his photographic experiments, the artist shapes found straw bale wires into models, achieving a rhythmic sensibility and a density of curved lines that are also seen in his large-scale bronze cast sculptures and paintings. Thus, immediately following a research process, in a copper-coated wire mesh that sculpts a pictorial gesture, he discovers a sculptural potential and succeeds in dramatising this form by transferring it to a symbolic context and reshaping it.

Meanwhile, the paintings he created using mixed techniques on paper, many examples of which are presented in the exhibition, can be regarded as surfaces that reveal internal forms through their rhythmic curves. Woll, who constantly intervenes in colour fields and achieves a complex or layered wholeness, enriches the surfaces obtained through the possibilities of the silk-screen printing technique by adding typographic elements. And/but, the artist, who does not hesitate to suddenly disrupt the resulting accumulation of images, nevertheless achieves a plain and straightforward abstract plane. In the process, he differentiates this approach through actions such as erasing and scraping, engaging in manipulative actions that are effective in a wider field. In any case, this approach, which creates painterly tensions between plane and depth effects, essentially brings him together with post-conceptual justifications, moreover ensuring that he puts forward lyrical abstraction as a fundamental aesthetic understanding.

In this context, Woll erases all traces of an illegible visual language, creating a new visual order and an expressive plastic effect. Therefore, this field of action-excavation, which seeks its identity in pursuit of the ambiguous and the random, consists of the remnants and traces of an explicit process of destruction. That is why Wool, with these paintings, wants to draw our attention to a new change that, in a way, develops the concept of Gray Paintings beyond the current improvisation.

the energy created by the search for opposition and balance

It is always possible to sense a tense and aggressive attitude lurking behind Woll’s seemingly emotional and serene paintings. The tension arising from the emergence of this narrative, shaped more by internal references, within a discipline of flow is undoubtedly a reflection of the contradictory cultural reality of a psycho-geography. Or it is the result of a search for contrast and balance stemming from the manifestation of these fundamental connections. Therefore, one can also speak of a distinct energy that emerges on surfaces based on continuity, harmony, and control, created by coexistence. Indeed, this energy can be seen as the fundamental factor reinforcing the expressive and improvisational nature of the paintings.

Ultimately, Christopher Woll pursues an abstract approach shaped by expressive gestures, seeking unconventional plasticity, effective aesthetic unity and a balanced technical synthesis. With his exhibited works, which are transitional, reveal the relationships between language and meaning, and are built upon abstract visual qualities, he creates a field of movement that, as always, is not limited to painting and continues to expand.