Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Tag: Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool

Installation view, Christopher Wool: See Stop Run West Texas, Brite Building, Marfa, Texas, May 2, 2025–May 2027. Photo: Christopher Wool

When Donald Judd began buying up property in Marfa, a remote West Texas town in a terrain of grassy high desert strewn with cattle ranches and sudden squat hills, he was looking for a new context for his art. More specifically: He was looking to free himself from the predominant context for art in that time (the 1970s) and place. “The art world in New York is terrible and has been terrible for a long time,” he later said. “I am very much against the museums and the critics and the business in New York.”1 In Marfa Judd aimed to install his work in perfect conditions and leave it there in perpetuity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Hylden

Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

The facetious joke – or is it a wry compliment? – about white monochrome paintings is that they hardly differentiate themselves from the walls they hang on. Despite choosing as his pictorial subject rectangles of blank white wall, Nathan Hylden worked hard to make the paintings in his exhibition ‘So There’s That’ as unblank and as unneutral as possible. Read the rest of this entry »