THE contemporary

3,000
2,000
1,000
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Skarstedt
Gallery
Retrospective – Crosstown Dundee
Auction > $1 million
Gagosian Gallery
Simon Lee Gallery
Serralves Foundation – Porto
1st monograph Taschen
Museum Ludwig – Cologne
Auction > $3 million
MAM – Paris
Auction > $25 million
Guggenheim – New York
Price Index for Christopher Wool Base 100 in January 2000
© ARTPRICE.COM
few major exhibitions on his CV, and yet this year,
Christopher Wool beat Jeff Koons in the ranking of
Contemporary artists by auction turnover!
Wool’s prices have seen almost exponential
growth. For example, the recent resale of Untitled
(Fool) (1990) that was initially acquired in February
2012 for $7.7 million at Christie’s in London and
subsequently resold on 12 November 2014 in New
York for $14.1 million, i.e. twice the previous price...
in just two years.
And yet Christopher Wool’s works are not rare on
the market: in the first semester of 2015, sixteen of
his paintings were submitted for sale without any
negative impact on demand. One of them, Untitled
(Riot) (1990), fetched $29.9 million at Sotheby’s in
New York on 12 may 2015, setting a new record for
the artist and underscoring the market’s intense enthusiasm
for the artist.
Since then, collectors’ appetites have spread beyond
his paintings and now the value of his prints
has started to rocket. On 11 June 2015, a work
entitled Run Dog Run (1991) composed of 3 prints
measuring 88 x 70 cm (from a limited edition of 125
copies) fetched $124,400 at Phillips in London.
If we look closer, we notice that the market is
particularly focused on a specific period in Wool’s
career, i.e. when he started using silkscreen techniques
to place large-scale letters of the alphabet
on canvases, forming words, sometimes orders,
sometimes humorous, sometimes coarse (1989-95).
These works, which collectors believe are Wool’s
best, were created at a critical moment in his career:
in 1989 Wool was given a major exhibition
at Max Hetzler’s Berlin gallery, which was simultaneously
supporting a substantial section of the
new generation of German painters, including Albert
Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger and Günther
Förg. So, at just 34, Christopher Wool was already
recognised by international experts as being at the
pinnacle of his art.
Nevertheless, Wool’s market is gradually turning
towards his later works, i.e. after 1995, when he began
to attract attention in the United States, particularly
at a first large-scale show at the MOCA in
Los Angeles in 1998. Thereafter, his career moved
into a much faster gear. In 2000, Wool rejoined the
Skarstedt Gallery in New York. Three years later
he presented a major exhibition (Crosstown) at the
Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre in Scotland,
which published a first catalogue raisonné of his
works. In 2005, one of his paintings crossed the
million-dollar threshold in a public sale.
Since 2006, the artist has been supported by
Larry Gagosian on the West Coast and by Simon
Lee in London and his work has been presented
in several major cities around the world: Porto
in 2009, Cologne in 2010, Paris in 2012 and New
York in 2013, at the Guggenheim. During the latter
exhibition (and not far from it, at 20 Rockefeller
Plaza) Christie’s sold one of his major works, Apo-
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