Jordan Wolfson “(Female Figure)”

The Brant Foundation

[Image: Jordan Wolfson "(Female figure)" (2014) Mixed media © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: John Smith.]

This event has ended.

The Brant Foundation presents Jordan Wolfson’s (Female Figure), 2014, at its East Village location. Last exhibited in New York City in 2014, this technologically complex sculpture will be on view at the Foundation’s historic building starting October 11th, housed in a new artwork-specific room.

Wolfson is well known for his powerful and unsettling artworks that examine the conditions of contemporary life. Pulling from a variety of sources, including advertising, the internet, and technology industries, the artist explores difficult and ambitious narratives. The questions he interrogates are numerous: How is information and imagery understood? What is the role of fetishization in art? How does technology infiltrate our perception of the world? These queries are decidedly left unanswered by the artist; Wolfson’s animated figures speak for themselves.

(Female Figure) combines film, installation and performance into an animatronic figure of Wolfson’s design. Scantily clad in a white negligée and sporting a blonde wig with thigh-high white boots, the robotic figure dances in front of a mirror. Black eyes follow the viewer from behind the sculpture’s green visage—likened to a witch’s mask—confronting the viewer with disgust: she is both attractive and grotesque.

As the sculpture gracefully dances to blaring pop-music, the whirrs and creaks from the figure’s joints remind the viewer of its technological construction. Simultaneously, Wolfson’s voice projects from the figure: the phrase, “My mother is dead, my father is dead, I’m gay, I’d like to be a poet, this is my house,” and the command to “Tell them touch is love,” are just two examples of the disorienting voiceover. There is no way to avoid sculpture’s narration nor gaze. (Female Figure) creates a different kind of viewing experience that inherently incorporates the viewer into the troubling and provoking performance of the sculpture. Here, it is the agitating tension between subject and object that truly encapsulates Wolfson’s immersive installation.

Jordan Wolfson (*1980, New York), studied sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Solo exhibitions were on display at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2019), Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin (2018), and the Pond Society, New Century Art Foundation in Shanghai (2017). In 2016 and 2017 Wolfson presented MANIC / LOVE / TRUTH / LOVE, an early career retrospective, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and 2015 at Cleveland Museum of Art. Further exhibitions were at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent (2013), Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2011), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009), Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (2008), Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (2007), and Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2004).

In 2009, he received the Cartier Award from the Frieze Foundation.