Christopher Wool Returns to London with His Largest UK Show in Two Decades
Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery hosts a major exhibition of the American artist’s latest works, exploring the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and process.
Christopher Wool — one of America’s most influential contemporary artists — returns to London this October with his largest UK exhibition since 2004. Opening at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery on 13 October, the show brings together more than fifty recent works on paper, prints, and sculptures that map out the evolution of Wool’s restless, self-questioning practice.
Best known for his stark monochrome word paintings and silkscreened canvases of the 1990s, Wool has since pushed further into abstraction, remixing his own imagery through layering, erasure, overpainting, and digital manipulation. At the heart of this new exhibition is a sense of continual undoing — a refusal of finality in favour of process.
Many of the featured works are created using silkscreen, enamel, oil, and industrial materials — but the outcome is never simply mechanical. Wool adds gestural marks using spray guns or drags turpentine-soaked rags across surfaces, producing a haze of erasure. At times he reintroduces pastel tones, softening the starkness of his earlier palette. Repetition, self-replication and fragmentation become part of a visual language that simultaneously conceals and reveals.
Six sculptures — ranging from intimate to large-scale — accompany the works on paper. First shown in his 2013–14 Guggenheim survey, these forms emerge from found materials collected in West Texas, where Wool now divides his time between Marfa and New York. Constructed from fencing wire and reworked into looping, linear gestures, the sculptures echo the improvisational energy of his paintings. Wool leaves visible the rough joins and welds — a conscious refusal of polish or perfection.
Also included are two series of recent etchings, one of which, Defenestration Suite (2023), was created to accompany What Just Happened, a book of poetry by longtime collaborator Richard Hell. Here, letters and lines intertwine, echoing the tension between language and image central to Wool’s career.
The exhibition runs alongside See Stop Run West Texas, a major solo presentation curated by Anne Pontégnie in Marfa. A new 400-page book documenting Wool’s evolving practice — including his 2024 installation in an empty New York high-rise — will be published this autumn. Both projects affirm Wool’s commitment to pushing the edges of what painting and sculpture can be — not fixed images, but ongoing investigations into form, process, and repetition.
Christopher Wool at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill
October 13–December 19, 2025
20 Grosvenor Hill, London
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
