Christopher Wool was born and brought up in Chicago. He moved to New York in the early 1970s, where he studied painting intermittently and worked as an assistant to the artist Joel Shapiro. His first show was at the Cable Gallery, New York, in 1984. Since then he has exhibited at many public and private galleries, including the Whitney Museum Biennial, 1989, Karsten Schubert, London, 1990, documenta IX, Kassel, in 1991, "Birth of the Cool: American Painting from Georgia O’Keeffe to Christopher Wool" at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Kunsthalle Basel in 1998 and "Mixing Memory and Desire" at the New Museum of Art Lucerne, Switzerland, 2000, where this new group of works on paper was shown for the first time.