“You must be here for me,” said a woman sitting at a small desk in the lobby of 101 Greenwich. Whether we didn’t look like office workers, or there are no office workers who head into 101 Greenwich on a weekday afternoon, was left unexplained. We were shown to a dedicated elevator that whisked us to the nineteenth floor where artist Christopher Wool has rented the entire story to install his largest exhibition since his 2014 Guggenheim retrospective.
Nothing is for sale and the exhibition space is a very large, abandoned, stripped-raw office deep in the Financial District. It’s a derelict, grungy, lightly graffitied, semi-unpainted vacancy on the nineteenth floor, alive with light from countless large windows looking out in three directions over the New York Harbor and some of the most historically significant land in the city. It’s like being a kid again.
Christopher Wool’s first major show in New York in a decade isn’t at a museum. It’s in a former office, which like a lot of office, had been sitting empty.