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Jordan Wolfson at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin

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Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Riverboat Song, 2017
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Exhibition view
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Jordan Wolfson, Real violence, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (detail), 2017
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Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (detail), 2017

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.

10.2.18 — 1.4.18

Photo by Andrea Rossetti

Schinkel Pavillon

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'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London

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