On the first searingly hot day of the summer, Jordan Wolfson stands inside his Los Angeles studio space wedged into a nondescript office park.
The 45-year-old artist is clad in a white T-shirt and pants, salt-and-pepper hair peeking out from under his Yankees cap. His three large, shaggy dogs mill around us. Wolfson points out various images—of the Twin Towers, the poet Allen Ginsberg as seen by A.I., Victorian porn—he’s sourced online, in academic archives, and from his own life. A selection will appear in his first New York solo exhibition with Gagosian this September. (“In classic Jordan fashion,” says Allyson Spellacy, one of the mega-gallery’s Beverly Hills directors, Wolfson will make the final call on imagery “when we have to open the show.”)
These photographs represent his view of the “collective paradoxes of the world in which we live,” he tells me. “All the images have a ringing feeling to me, and then collectively they ring in a certain tone together.” They will be mounted on aluminum sculptures festooned with barbed corners and propped against the walls on opposite sides of Gagosian’s 555 West 24th Street location. The spikes are real, Wolfson says, lightly brushing his finger again stone. When I inquire about their importance, he responds: “Do you prefer them without the spikes?” I’m not sure what I prefer, and I’m not sure it matters to him either way. Yet the spikes, and Wolfson’s way of describing them, are an apt metaphor for his art—which, if nothing else, sparks a meta-interrogation of your own reaction to it.
“There’s a dance between what’s true and what’s not true.” — Jordan Wolfson
Born in 1980, Wolfson was raised first on the Upper West Side, then in Connecticut, in what he describes as a “super” liberal, secular Jewish household of artists, creatives, and intellectuals. He grappled with learning disabilities and behavioral issues in school, but quickly counters that this facet of his upbringing is “not anything that I ask for any compassion for.” At 18, Wolfson left for RISD, where he earned a BFA in sculpture and began making videos. As a nascent artist, he became interested in figures like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Chris Burden, and Mike Kelley, who probed fraught questions of identity and moral doctrine. But Wolfson’s closest creative ancestor might be Jeff Koons, an artist similarly interested in the formal collateral and commodification of provocation.
Wolfson catapulted to fame at 25 after the 2006 Whitney Biennial, where he presented a sound installation of crow calls on the museum’s roof and a plaintive short black-and-white film of an actor signing Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator in ASL. Over the next two decades, Wolfson built a body of work spanning video, animatronic, and performance work—like a hypersexualized robotic sculpture (Female Figure), 2014, that dances to pop music while a voiceover of Wolfson reads out lines, including “My mother is dead, my father is dead, I’m gay, I’d like to be a poet, this is my house”—that earned him very vocal fans and critics. “He bores right into the controversy,” says the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch, Wolfson’s onetime neighbor in LA. (Early champions included Deitch, artist John Armleder, and curator Beatrix Ruf, while Ben Davis, reviewing the 2017 Whitney Biennial, described Wolfson’s Real Violence, a VR piece that sees the artist seemingly beating another man to death to a score of Hebrew prayers, as work that “gets you talking—but mainly about how shallow art can be.”)
Wolfson’s irreverent and often callous tackling of everything from HIV to race made him a frequent subject of ire during an era of heightened awareness and caution around identity and social justice. (In 2016, Wolfson was criticized for dubbing one of his pieces, an animatronic puppet of a Chucky-lookalike white boy being thrashed around, Colored sculpture; it was acquired by the Tate Modern two years later.) An edgy persona emerged alongside this critical polarization, only reinforced by Wolfson’s public comments. At a New Museum Q&A in 2017, an audience member asked Wolfson about his privilege in separating his personal and professional life to create Real Violence. Wolfson responded: “What privilege?” Just as liberal culture was actively attempting to deprioritize the straight white male gaze, Wolfson was becoming a hypervisible art star in spite—or perhaps because—of how offensive his work could seem. But what does shock factor amount to in 2026, when nothing’s shocking anymore?
“The persona isn’t my true character, and it’s not necessarily something I’m cultivating.” — Jordan Wolfson
These days, Wolfson appears to be more protective of how he’s perceived. Twice during our interview, he reminds me that he is also recording our conversation. He strikes me as someone who’d like to cast off the compulsively irreverent image he was associated with early in his career: “I was probably pretty obnoxious in my 20s, as a lot of young people… young men are.” Wolfson stresses that his public profile “isn’t my true character,” though he acknowledges that it is a “light extension” of his art. (I spot a copy of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona script on the desk in his studio.)
Wolfson is currently concerned with the “dance between what’s true and what’s not true,” especially at a time when A.I. has made it nearly impossible to discern the difference. Recent pieces evince this contemporary slipperiness: In Little Room, 2025, two people are paired up, given VR goggles and, after undergoing 3-D body scans, see themselves from the vantage point of the other person standing before them. (Walk a day in his shoes?) Though he does not believe that A.I. should be used to replace the creative act itself, he defends its use as a tool.
For a Prada campaign earlier this year, Wolfson conjured winged creatures and staged them alongside the Italian house’s celebrity faces. Although representatives stated that A.I. was only used in post-production, the visuals were still pilloried by fans of the luxury brand online as “A.I. slop.” (The artist has weathered controversy with stable and prestigious gallery representation—Gagosian was the latest to add him to its roster in 2022, co-representing Wolfson with David Zwirner and Sadie Coles HQ—as well as a steady stream of institutional support, including from the Fondation Beyeler and the National Gallery of Australia, which purchased his piece Body Sculpture for $4.5 million. He’s at work on robotic pieces for a new institutional show next year.)
Artist and critic Ajay Kurian, who showed alongside Wolfson in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and wrote a piece called “The Ballet of White Victimhood” in response to Colored sculpture, says Wolfson might be better positioned to navigate our fraught political era than we think—in part because he’s still willing to go to out-there places when self-censorship is rampant and because his subversiveness is now “received into a culture that appreciates that.” “I feel like [Wolfson] likes asking provocative questions in the work,” Kurian continues, “and I think they come from a genuine place.”
According to Spellacy, Wolfson’s New York show, opening on Sept. 18, will evoke 9/11 in some capacity. (The gallery already has several holds on a handful of the pieces that will be exhibited.) We will see what the national tragedy’s 25th anniversary brings out of the artist in his fifth decade. Wolfson tells me he’s prioritizing intuition over discourse; he tries “not to think.” When asked to clarify, he concludes: “I mean that if you think too much, you’re gonna find a reason not to do something.”
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