David Zwirner is pleased to present its first exhibition with Jordan Wolfson, on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York. Wolfson, who joined the gallery in 2013, will debut an animatronic sculpture, a major development in the artist's practice. Also on view will be new wall-mounted sculptures and the video Raspberry Poser (2012), shown in New York for the first time.
Over the past decade, Wolfson has become known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, and the technology industries to produce ambitious and enigmatic narratives. However, instead of simply appropriating found material, the artist creates his own unique content, which frequently revolves around a series of invented, animated characters.
Presented here for the first time, Wolfson's animatronic sculpture, titled (Female figure), 2014, combines film, installation, and performance in the figure of a curvaceous, scantily clad woman covered in dirt marks and wearing a witch mask. Unlike the artist's two-dimensional subjects, this life-size character was developed in close collaboration with a special effects studio in California used by major Hollywood productions. The woman can be encountered on a one-on-one basis in a mirrored room in the gallery, creating a different kind of viewing experience that intensifies the importance of the gaze found throughout Wolfson's work.
In a new series of sculptures mounted to the wall, digital inkjet prints featuring their own cast of cartoon characters are overlaid with the artist's bumper stickers, which also align the four sides of the sculptures. These stickers combine to create jumbled narratives seemingly intended for mass consumption. While they appear readymade, each has been designed and written by Wolfson.
Composed of digital video, computer-generated imagery, and the artist's drawings, Raspberry Poser is part of a series of works that began with Con Leche, an animation of marching Diet Coke bottles from 2009, and also include Animation, masks from 2011 featuring his Shylockian Jew character. Unlike these earlier videos, Raspberry Poser involves multiple subjects, including a punk played by Wolfson himself wandering around New York City and Paris, a heart-filled condom, bouncy HIV viruses, and a chilled-out, self-destructive adolescent cartoon character.