Jordan Wolfson

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works on paper by Jordan Wolfson at the gallery in Basel. Drawings, the gallery’s first exhibition of Wolfson’s work since announcing its representation of the artist in 2022, features thirty-five framed works from the series JFK Jr. (2020–).

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. 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.”

Drawings is a relatively unassuming first 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.