Artist: Jordan Wolfson
Venue: Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany
Date: February 10 – March 1, 2018
Photography: Andrea Rossetti, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
Schinkel Pavillon is pleased to announce the opening of Jordan Wolfson’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin on February 9th. Wolfson’s practice has traversed video, film, installation, performance, print and photography. He employs animation, digital imaging and animatronic sculpture in order to represent central ideas of literal and virtual reality. It is the projection of inner impulses (desire, optimism, violence or guilt) in constructed selves or scenarios that the artist is most interested in.
Riverboat Song is a narcissistic surreal nightmare, drawn from the banalities and horrors of contemporary life and its online extension. Combining animation and found clips, pop soundtracks and voiceover, the video revolves around a Huckelberry Finn or Alfred E. Neuman character who has yet recurred and morphed in Wolfson’s works Colored Sculpture and Black Sculpture. The installation is presented on a video wall made up of 16 monitors and adopts formulaic elements of the internet such as avatars, memes, clips, and mash-ups combining them into a dark psychodrama, in which the line between the perverse and the gleeful is erased.
One clip in Riverboat Song of a man continuously punching another has been the stimulus for Wolfson’s highly discussed work Real Violence. Exhibited in the Schinkel Klause, it is the first time the piece is shown in Germany. The virtual reality work reflects the manic brutality of a witness’s iPhone video of real-life violence and translates this into a heightened, disorienting, and contextless experience.
The power of Wolfson’s work owes equally to the visceral impact of its complex, animated representations – which slide seamlessly from banal to violent, and from vividly imaginary to scarily real – and to its disturbing refusal to judge. Wolfson exploits the distortions of cartoon characters to render human acts and behaviors without moralizing or polemic.
Jordan Wolfson (*1980) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2017; LUMA Foundation, Arles, 2016; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 2015; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2014; S.M.A.K. Ghent, 2013; Kunsthalle Wien, 2012; CCA Wattis, San Francisco, 2009; Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York, 2008; Kunsthalle Zürich, 2004.
Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017, edition of 5 (+ 2AP), video installation, 7:27 min, copyright the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017, edition of 5 (+ 2AP), video installation, 7:27 min, copyright the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017, edition of 5 (+ 2AP), video installation, 7:27 min, copyright the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017, edition of 5 (+ 2AP), video installation, 7:27 min, copyright the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017, edition of 5 (+ 2AP), video installation, 7:27 min, copyright the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2018, exhibition view, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Real violence, 2017, virtual-reality headset, headphones, high-definition video, color, sound, 2:25 min, dimensions variable, copyright the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2017, spray paint, marker on inkjet print mounted on dibond in aluminium artist‘s frame, two aluminum armatures with two found studded leather jackets with acrylic paint, plywood, „u“ shaped bolts, metal chain, copyright the artist; courtesy Ringier collection, Switzerland, 251.5 x 203.2 x 113.7 cm, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2017, spray paint, marker on inkjet print mounted on dibond in aluminium artist‘s frame, two aluminum armatures with two found studded leather jackets with acrylic paint, plywood, „u“ shaped bolts, metal chain, copyright the artist; courtesy Ringier collection, Switzerland, 251.5 x 203.2 x 113.7 cm, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2017, spray paint, marker on inkjet print mounted on dibond in aluminium artist‘s frame, two aluminum armatures with two found studded leather jackets with acrylic paint, plywood, „u“ shaped bolts, metal chain, copyright the artist; courtesy Ringier collection, Switzerland, 251.5 x 203.2 x 113.7 cm, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, detail, 2017, spray paint, marker on inkjet print mounted on dibond in aluminium artist‘s frame, two aluminum armatures with two found studded leather jackets with acrylic paint, plywood, „u“ shaped bolts, metal chain, copyright the artist; courtesy Ringier collection, Switzerland, 251.5 x 203.2 x 113.7 cm, photo: Andrea Rossetti
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, detail, 2017, spray paint, marker on inkjet print mounted on dibond in aluminium artist‘s frame, two aluminum armatures with two found studded leather jackets with acrylic paint, plywood, „u“ shaped bolts, metal chain, copyright the artist; courtesy Ringier collection, Switzerland, 251.5 x 203.2 x 113.7 cm, photo: Andrea Rossetti
