Christoper Wool at the Guggenheim

Christopher Wool's work is self-explanatory.  He makes word paintings, gestural paintings.  A massive sculpture, placed outside the Guggenheim, takes you to his world of swirling, muted gesture painting.  Like other New York School painters he pours paint onto his canvases, rice paper, metal, other surfaces.  Hung abutting each other are a hundred photographs.  Again words.  He sees grays and blacks and light in the urban settings that he has captured with his camera.  As you go up levels, the paintings have color, get bigger, many patterns on patterns.  But there is something about this artist--the way in which he makes a painting--that has a lot of emotion to it.  You connect through form and through his use of grays, blacks, white and then Color!

The Guggenheim is brilliant at drawing families to exhibits.  Anyone can participate in activities that they have created  that bring kids and parents and adults into the work.  All of these activities can be found on the website www.guggenheim.org.

There's a multimedia app you can download that has three short films related to the exhibit.  The show opens October 25th and runs through January 22, 2014.