David Zwirner is pleased to present a new sculptural work by Jordan Wolfson, on view at 525 West 19th Street in New York. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery since he joined in 2013. The work is presented in partnership with Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Wolfson has become known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. Pulling intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, and the technology industry, he produces ambitious and enigmatic narratives that frequently revolve around a series of invented, animated characters.
The red hair, freckles, and boyish look of Colored sculpture draw associations to such literary and pop cultural characters as Huckleberry Finn, Howdy Doody, and Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of Mad magazine. Highly polished in appearance, the work is suspended with heavy chains from a large mechanized gantry, which is programmed to choreograph its movements. The sheer physicality of the installation, which fills the entire gallery space and includes the work being hoisted and thrown forcefully to the ground, viscerally blurs the distinction between figuration and abstraction, while furthering the formal and narrative possibilities of sculpture.
The sculpture’s eyes employ facial recognition technology to track spectators’ gazes and movements, thereby adding another layer of interactive corporeality to the work. Using fiber optics, its eyes also intermittently display a range of imagery and video footage, including the artist’s own animations and filmed footage, and other found visual material, all of which seem to mine the subconscious preoccupations and desires of our society and consumer culture.
The work’s incongruous accompanying soundtrack further underscores the complex tensions and distortions that the artist establishes between reality and artificiality, subject and object, meaning and sense.
Jordan Wolfson was born in 1980 in New York. In 2003, he received his B.F.A. in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. The artist joined David Zwirner in 2013; his first exhibition at the gallery was in 2014.
In 2015, the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio held a solo show featuring two early videos by Wolfson. In 2014, a selection of Wolfson’s video work was shown at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow as part of the 6th Glasgow International. Also in 2014, the artist participated in 14 Rooms, which was curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist and presented during Art Basel in June 2014. The exhibition was a collaboration between Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, and Theater Basel. In 2013, Jordan Wolfson: Ecce Homo/le Poseur marked the most comprehensive survey of his work to date, organized by the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent. Also in 2013 was his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom presented at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. Other institutions which have previously hosted solo shows include the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; REDCAT, Los Angeles (both 2012); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2011); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (2008); Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy (2007); and the Kunsthalle Zürich (2004).
In 2009, he received the prestigious Cartier Award from the Frieze Foundation, which helps an artist from outside the United Kingdom realize a major project at Frieze Art Fair in London.
Work by Wolfson is held in public collections worldwide, including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
