121 Minutes With ...Christopher Wool

The blue-chip punk-rock artist rented an empty floor of an office building to put on a show just the way he wanted to.

WHEN I ARRIVE at the 1907 Beaux Arts office building a few blocks south of the World Trade Center, a guard in the slickly renovated lobby of 101 Greenwich swipes me through the security turnstiles to an elevator that takes me to the 19th floor.

The doors open to a sunny, 18,000-square-foot raw office space, cords dangling from the ceiling, with a wall of windows overlooking the Trinity Church spire and various skyscrapers. Not so long ago, this floor was home to Daniel Libeskind's architecture practice, but now, like a number of other floors in this building and many more throughout the post-pandemic city, it sits empty.

This desolation seems to delight the artist Christopher Wool, who has rented the space to put on a show of his recent paintings and sculptures. "Nothing could be better," he says, pointing to a crumbling pink column with globs of construction adhesive stuck to it. Chunks of stone are missing from the floor. On another column across the room, someone had crudely spray-painted a penis. “I could live here,” he says.

Wool is there finalizing the installation for the show’s March 14 opening. He has chunky black glasses and a white ponytail that mark him still as the trailblazing 1980s and ’90s artist he was, hanging out at the Mudd Club, partying with Nan Goldin, and admiring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti, Richard Hell’s punk poetry, and Jamie Nares’s Super 8 films. His austere paintrollered, stenciled, and screen-printed canvases in many ways reflect the seedy, anti-Establishment New York he was then working in and inspired by.