Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (2020), via Gagosian
Opening in conjunction with the hustle and bustle of fair week in Basel, artist Jordan Wolfson presents a selection of works at Gagosian that continue his incisive and often wry investigations of violence, pop culture, and constructions of identity. Pairing painted-over photographs of the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. with decals bearing the graphic image of a red rose and the forbidding slogan “Describing how a dog was slaughtered,” Wolfson juxtaposes and mischievously negates potent signifiers of optimism, infallibility, and love.
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (2020), via Gagosian
Characterizing the late presidential scion as a celebrated but problematic harbinger of American neoliberalism, the artist transforms him, through brutally simple acts of defacement, from a member of the moneyed elite into an outsider figure, scrawling on his face in an echo of Groucho Marx’s notorious greasepaint mustache. The works are in this sense also self-portraits of their maker as Little J., a college nickname that stood for “Little Jordan,” “Little Jerk,” or “Little Jew.”
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (2020), via Gagosian
Drawings is a relatively unassuming project at Gagosian for Wolfson, who is known for using a range of mediums—including sculpture, installation, video, photography, digital animation, and performance—in a confrontational style and at spectacular scale. Employing a collage-like methodology, he filters the evolving languages of online and broadcast media through digital and mechanical technologies to explore unsettling social and psychological themes. Wolfson’s oeuvre is marked by the fusion of physical, virtual, and imaginary realms, and revolves around the projection of internal impulses onto constructed selves and scenarios. Focused on the disorienting power of the uncanny, his images and objects have a real and lasting emotional force.
Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (2020), via Gagosian
The disturbing text of the stickers in the works on view in Basel represents the horror of destroying a consciousness and the heartbreak of denying love. Having begun the JFK Jr. series as one way to address the Trump phenomenon without picturing the progressive bête noire directly—positioning instead the altered JFK Jr. as his ideological opposite—Wolfson presents the drawings’ relatively intimate scale when compared with many of his other works as accessible and, perhaps, heartbreaking.
The show closes July 22nd.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Jordan Wolfson at Gagosian [Exhibition Site]
