Shrewdly commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia in 2019, when it was still an idea in development, Wolfson’s latest razzle-dazzle corresponds somehow to this locale; his most inward-looking work, its cultural quotations are met with transfixing moments of self-absorption.
In 2003, while a student at New York’s Rhode Island School of Design, the artist Jordan Wolfson encountered a classical Buddhist sculpture in the campus museum. It was a simple thing, but something about it lodged deep in his consciousness and stayed there. He remembers it well: how he would visit the museum, and spend time simply looking at the unassuming figure, basking in its palpable energy. At times it appeared as if it might overwhelm him. “It was like I would hallucinate that it would come and it would, like, smash me,” he tells me. “It was a crazy feeling.
Arts editor HELEN MUSA has spent an extraordinary 30 minutes watching the National Gallery's latest acquisition, a huge, moving sculpture by American artist Jordan Wolfson, titled "Body Sculpture".