Gagosian sent out a decidedly sparse press release about Jordan Wolfson’s first show with the gallery in New York, set to open September 18 at its 555 West 24th Street space in Chelsea.
The description of the new work to be shown reads, in its entirety: “A selection of new uniformly scaled sculptures incorporates emblematic color and black-and-white photographs, sourced online and from personal and academic archives, that resonate with art history, popular culture, and Wolfson’s own preoccupations.”
Other than that, there’s mention of a conversation between the artist and Ottessa Moshfegh (the writer of such novels as Lapvona, Death in Her Hands, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation) to be published in the Fall issue of Gagosian Quarterly and one image, which turns out to be a Getty photograph of East Village street trash scattered at the corner of 12th Street and Avenue B during a sanitation strike decades ago.
Wolfson has garnered no small amount of attention since breaking out with his first David Zwirner show in 2014, when he debuted an animatronic sculpture that danced with itself in a mirror. Next came an exhibition around a creepy Howdy Doody-ish figure that met countless violent fates while being cast about mechanistically on chains in 2016.
For the 2017 Whitney Biennial, he created a virtual-reality work titled Real Violence for which viewers donned headsets to watch a horrific beatdown by way of a baseball bat. Of the work, he told ARTnews at the time: “When you see a sculpture, like a Bernini sculpture, you circle around it, you move up, you’re using your body. What I feel about this is, the human body is a sculpture and this is like a body sculpture.”
Wolfson was most recently in the news this past spring for a Prada ad campaign he created around models and actors including Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, and Damson Idris posing with giant birds.
