Christopher Wool Holzwarth Berlin Lot of 5 Signed Books Bad Rabbit, Road, Yard, Swamp, and Westtexaspsychosculpture

“When I was first at Chinati I found a piece of wire that looked exactly like my drawing line only better and I thought it was funny to take this baroque piece of wire off the Judd landscape … As I started to find more pieces of wire that were like drawn line, I started saving them, for no particular reason. It was only years later that it dawned on me that these flattened balls of wire could be reconfigured in a three-dimensional way.” - Christopher Wool

This a 5 Book lot from Christopher Wool published by Holzwarth Publications, Berlin. Each Book was published in different years. Books included are 'Bad Rabbit', 'Road', 'Yard', 'Swamp' andthe Book 'Westtexaspsychosculpture' all included for sale in this Lot of 5. These are great Collectables only to gain value as all are signed and printed in editions of 1200 for each title. A Special edition was printed for 'Yard' in an edition of 92 with a Signed Foto.

01.Bad Rabbit. Artist's Book Edition of 1,200, dated 2022, signed by C. WoolSoftcover with dust jacket 25.4 x 38.1 cm. 192 pages 92 duotone illustrations.

02. Swamp. Edition of 1,200, dated 2019, all signed by C. Wool Softcover with dust jacket 25.4 x 38.1 cm. 140 pages. 68 duotone illustrations.

03. Yard. Edition of 1,200, dated 2018, all signed by C. Wool Softcover with dust jacket 25.4 x 38.1 cm. 184 pages 92 duotone illustrations.

04. Road. Edition of 1,200, dated 2017, signed by C. Wool Softcover with dust jacket 25.4 x 38.1 cm. 192 pages 92 duotone illustrations.

05. Westtexaspsychosculpture. Edition of 1,200, dated 2017, all signed by C. Wool  Softcover with dust jacket 25.4 x 38.1 cm 226 pages 108 duotone illustrations

001. Bad Rabbit is Christopher Wool’s fifth artist’s book with Holzwarth Publications, and again it builds on aspects of the previous volumes. The series started with two sets of photographs of roads and littered backyards around Marfa and Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Texas. For the third book, the artist superimposed two different realities in each picture; in the fourth the original photographic gaze acted as merely the basic layer for new image worlds created through processing and reproduction. Now, in Bad Rabbit, Wool directs his attention back to fragments of the original reality, turning the microcosm into a macrocosm as he takes found pieces of fencing and hay-baling wire and explores their sculptural qualities in starkly black-and-white photographs. In his sculptural practice, the artist enlarges some of these potential maquettes and casts them in bronze and steel; in the photos works collected here, the found object becomes a subject of observation, its sculptural form created in its framing and in the later treatment of the images: Wool positions each model in the center of the photo on a horizon line where the floor meets the wall. From picture to picture, the wire changes and moves, the strands rise and loop back on themselves, thicken into chaotic tangles and branch freely into the empty space. The sequence of varying and returning motifs, of varying but similar stagings, creates its own narrative, forcing us to look again and detect different imageries, while the carefully blown-out reproductions lead the wire’s freewheeling sculptural line back to the graphic flatness of the artist’s paintings.

002. Swamp. On first view, the photographic superimpositions in black and brown offer nothing to hold onto. Their unruly surfaces lead into the depth, into fragments of motifs: backyards, dumped car tires, huge cable drums, dead tree stumps, rusty bed frames, or the wall of a shack with strange objects leaning against it. If, on second view, the eye manages to separate the different layers of reality meshed here, in the end the decipherable photographic images collapse again into painterly textures. Swamp is the fourth artist’s book from the series Wool has published with Holzwarth Publications: Road, Yard, Swamp, Bad Rabbit, and Westtexaspsychosculpture. The later Book are collected photos of bumpy roads or sculpture-like found objects in Texan surroundings; then, in Yard from 2018, the artist clearly superimposed two different realities. Now Swamp is another step in the process, developing new pictures through processing and reproduction, for which the original photographic gaze acts as just the basic layer.

003.Yard. in this artist’s book from 2018, Christopher Wool layers photos of backyard debris and dusty roads, of Texan wilderness and found situations rife with allusions to sculpture. Two realities invade each other, and their overlapping actualities collapse into an artistic reality beyond the moment caught by the artist’s camera. Thus the pictures are imbued with the history of their own making and filled with a vibrant sound close to that of Wool’s black-and-white paintings. Similar to his painting process, Wool resamples his own earlier work: theimages in Yard were composed from photos appearing in the artist’s books Road and Westtexaspsychosculpture, Holzwarth Publications.

004. Road is an artist’s book composed from a series photographs that Christopher Wool shot between 2015 and 2017. Dust roads, gravel roads, partly overgrown or full of tire tracks, through desert and fields of rocks, through sparse woods and along precipices. Only seldom does a fork in the road offer a choice of which way to go, and though the place always changes from one shot to the next, it still feels like one long road traveled under the clear light of the Texas sun.

005. Westtexaspsychosculpture. This artist’s book comprises photographs Christopher Wool made between 2008 and 2017 in the surroundings of Marfa in West Texas. Pictures of found situations: of backyard debris and improvised storage solutions, stray animals and strange constructions that once must have made sense but now appear undecipherable. Things set adrift and excerpts from the landscape that appear almost like sculpture for the split second of the open lens.