The Gallery has acquired its first sculpture by Christopher Wool (b. 1955). Untitled (2017) will be installed in the Sculpture Garden in early summer 2021. The work's serpentine lines are a careful compositional choice that reflects Wool's recent gestural paintings. Given to the National Gallery in honor of Wool's parents, this sculpture joins the artist's color screenprint My House (2000) in the Gallery's collection.

For more than 30 years, Wool has pursued his career as a painter with focus and intensity, working almost entirely in black and white, reflecting the urban grit of his New York surroundings by using either large stenciled words or by exploring abstract lines, shapes, and patterns. Since 2007 Wool has been living part-time in Marfa, Texas, where he began to make sculptures inspired by tangles of old fencing and hay-baling wire that he finds on his property. He uses the wire to create small maquettes, some of which are then subjected to an elaborate process of 3D-scanning, computer-aided enlargement, and fabrication using metal alloys engineered for structural integrity.