Summary
Artist Jordan Wolfson debuts a new body of work at Gagosian's 24th Street gallery for his first New York solo since 2017The exhibition, open until October 24, features sculptures complete with aluminum spikes and UV printsThe images within the exhibition draw on the artist's preoccupations, art history, and pop culture to get at tensions of concealment within society
Jordan Wolfson, the artist known for subverting (and perverting) technology, has made a much-anticipated return to New York with a new solo exhibition at Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery.
A troupe of spiked steel structures flanks the space, each housing UV prints of subjects, both appropriated and digitally rendered. The mirror-polished finish on the sculptures lures viewers further into the individual images, opening up the space, while corner spikes call back to his horror film-inspired works.
While the artist teased the presentation as “a very traditional sculpture show” last month to Artnet, the images, of course, unsettle. A pair of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flowers sit beside photographs of the Freedom and Twin Towers, while a shawl-clad Michael Jackson looks solemnly on. A young, ripped CGI Bob Dylan also joins the cast. Then there’s “Made In Heaven,” arguably the most talked-about piece in the show so far, an AI-generated reimagining of Jeff Koons’ 1989 series made to look straight out of a Pixar film.
“The images in the show, the reason I think I intuitively liked them, was that each felt like it was concealing something and there was a tension to that,” Wolfson told Ottessa Moshfegh in the latest Gagosian Quarterly.
Be it through his 2017 VR installation, Real Violence, which saw the artist beat another, albeit animatronic, figure to a pulp, or his somehow equally controversial AI-assisted campaign for Prada Spring/Summer 2026, satisfying resolution has no part in Wolfson's playbook. But that confusion seems to be the point, and the same can be said for his ongoing exhibition.
“To me, that’s a sign of a good artwork, book, film, in the same way that your novels continue to linger inside me — because they’re not necessarily things I understand,” he continued. “That confusion is actually very productive.”
The exhibition is now on view in New York until October 24.
Gagosian
555 W 24th St,
New York, NY 10011