Jordan Wolfson Brings a New World of Digital Unease to Gagosian

Jordan Wolfson’s unsettling mixture of technology, popular culture and psychological theater returns to New York this fall with a new exhibition at Gagosian. The show, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in New York, will be on view September 18 through October 24, 2026, at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street.

Wolfson, born in New York in 1980 and now based in Los Angeles, has built a reputation for making work that occupies an uneasy territory between sculpture, animation, digital imagery and performance. His figures and environments often borrow the visual language of advertising, video games, social media and broadcast entertainment, only to twist those familiar forms into something psychologically disorienting.

The forthcoming exhibition continues that approach while introducing a group of new works developed in Wolfson’s Los Angeles studio. A recent conversation between the artist and novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, published by Gagosian Quarterly, offers an unusually detailed preview. Among the works discussed are reflective metal objects incorporating photographic and digitally manipulated imagery, including an image based on a Renoir portrait. Wolfson has described using polished bands of metal to create shifting reflections across the works and throughout the gallery, deliberately complicating the viewer’s perception of the space.

The exhibition also brings together images drawn from an eclectic cultural vocabulary. Moshfegh describes encountering references to artists including Philip Guston and Jeff Koons, as well as imagery that evokes the aesthetics of internet pornography and artificial intelligence. Rather than presenting these references as a straightforward narrative, Wolfson appears interested in the unstable associations they generate when placed alongside one another.

That ambiguity is central to his practice. Wolfson has said that he is less interested in leading viewers toward a single interpretation than in leaving them in a state of uncertainty. His works frequently combine attraction and repulsion, humor and menace, artificiality and intimacy. The result can feel less like looking at an object than entering a psychological environment.

The exhibition follows a series of major institutional presentations that have established Wolfson as one of the more provocative artists working with contemporary technologies. His recent projects include Little Room at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in 2025 and Body Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 2024. His 2023 exhibition Drawings at Gagosian in Basel brought together works based on manipulated photographs of John F. Kennedy Jr.

Wolfson’s work has consistently questioned the boundary between the real and the fabricated. In the new exhibition, reflective surfaces, digitally mediated images and references to familiar cultural icons promise to make that boundary even harder to locate.

For an artist whose work often turns technological spectacle into something more psychologically complicated, the Gagosian exhibition arrives at a moment when the distinction between human experience and digitally generated imagery is itself becoming increasingly uncertain. Wolfson’s latest works may offer no easy answers—but that discomfort appears to be precisely the point.