Jordan Wolfson at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin

Schinkel Pavillon is pleased to announce the opening of Jordan Wolfson’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin on February 9th. Wolfson’s practice has traversed video, film, installation, performance, print and photography. He employs animation, digital imaging and animatronic sculpture in order to represent central ideas of literal and virtual reality. It is the projection of inner impulses (desire, optimism, violence or guilt) in constructed selves or scenarios that the artist is most interested in.

Riverboat Song is a narcissistic surreal nightmare, drawn from the banalities and horrors of contemporary life and its online extension. Combining animation and found clips, pop soundtracks and voiceover, the video revolves around a Huckelberry Finn or Alfred E. Neuman character who has yet recurred and morphed in Wolfson’s works Colored Sculpture and Black Sculpture. The installation is presented on a video wall made up of 16 monitors and adopts formulaic elements of the internet such as avatars, memes, clips, and mash-ups combining them into a dark psychodrama, in which the line between the perverse and the gleeful is erased.

One clip in Riverboat Song of a man continuously punching another has been the stimulus for Wolfson’s highly discussed work Real Violence. Exhibited in the Schinkel Klause, it is the first time the piece is shown in Germany. The virtual reality work reflects the manic brutality of a witness’s iPhone video of real-life violence and translates this into a heightened, disorienting, and contextless experience.

The power of Wolfson’s work owes equally to the visceral impact of its complex, animated representations – which slide seamlessly from banal to violent, and from vividly imaginary to scarily real – and to its disturbing refusal to judge. Wolfson exploits the distortions of cartoon characters to render human acts and behaviors without moralizing or polemic.