The Only Shocking Thing About Jordan Wolfson’s Gagosian Show Is How Boring It Is

Jordan Wolfson’s first New York gallery show in a decade arrived at Gagosian last Friday, exactly a week after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, bringing with it three new sculptures related to that fateful day. One features an architectural model of the World Trade Center, shown in solemn black and white; another has a picture of the Twin Towers at dusk, pixelated as though pulled from the depths of the internet; and yet another features the Freedom Tower, the building’s metallic surface gleaming with sunlight.

These works are classic Wolfson, in that they are designed to elicit a reaction: pearl-clutching, perhaps, or self-righteous handwringing. From me, however, they get one big shrug.

Wolfson’s latest exhibition is shocking because of how boring it is, which is not something I would have said about any of the artist’s previous shows. His prior pieces have included a cyborg monster suggestively gyrating before a mirror, a chained-up child doll that repeatedly slammed itself to the ground, and a VR horror show that allowed viewers to look on as the artist bashed in a man’s head using both a baseball bat and his legs. Last year, he used VR once more, this time to allow viewers to body swap—without advance warning. You certainly cannot accuse Wolfson of playing it safe.

Having worked in this provocative vein for the past decade or so, Wolfson has garnered passionate critical takes, placement in two Whitney Biennials, a loyal collector base, and a collaboration with Prada, all of which have made him a phenomenon with appeal beyond the art world. (His bona fides within his industry are impressive, too: Since 2022, he’s been represented by both Gagosian and David Zwirner, which Nate Freeman termed an “art-world EGOT-level feat” in a recent profile of Wolfson in Vanity Fair.) Prized for his ability to jar and jolt, Wolfson has finally delivered something that is, by his standards, not very surprising at all. He called his Gagosian exhibition a “very traditional sculpture show,” and it pretty much is exactly that.

The untitled exhibition is composed entirely of aluminum sculptures, most of which are propped against the wall of one windowless room. All the sculptures have spikes at their corners, and nearly all of them are polished in the center, causing them to appear reflective. Save for two works, all are inset with large photographic prints.

A sign at the front of the gallery warns of “mature content” and “sharp edges,” and instructs adults to monitor any children they bring inside the show. (Fair enough, since Instagram is deleting posts featuring some of the works, due to their family-unfriendly content.) Once I walked the length of a long corridor to reach the gallery, a guard stopped me and warned me not to touch the sculptures’ spikes. I had no intention of doing so, but one more warning is necessary, I suppose, for work that thinks it is so hard-edged.

The pieces look back to Minimalism, whose austere surfaces and heavy industrial materials menace viewers with the possibility of death and doom. The influence is most acute in two photo-less works Wolfson has placed in the gallery’s center; both look like ramps that lead nowhere. (Think Richard Serra’s Elevational Wedge, from 2001, but shorter and at a steeper incline.) Into the works along the walls, Wolfson has set images that refer to other art historical moments across time.

For example, there’s one work riffing on Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven,” a 1989–91 series of paintings and sculptures in which the artist and the porn star Cicciolina, then his romantic partner, are graphically shown in a variety of sex positions. Wolfson has here taken an image in which a nude Koons is shown cupping the thighs of Cicciolina, who exposes her vulva for all to see. Wolfson has then run the painting through an AI generator, remaking Koons so that he now appears with the moony eyes and flushed cheeks of the so-called “Pixar DILF.” It’s a lame one-liner of an artwork, particularly so because Wolfson opts for one of the tamest “Made in Heaven” paintings.

Wolfson also takes on another daredevil of the era: Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs documenting S&M subcultures earned the condemnation of high-ranking American politicians and helped fuel a culture war. But Wolfson once more goes the less dangerous route, appropriating a 1984 photograph of two tulips in a black void instead of something more explicit. In an unusually deferential gesture for this bad-boy artist, Gagosian’s checklist states that Wolfson used the photo with the permission of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Nearby, there’s a piece taking aim at Philip Guston, whose 1969 painting The Studio, featuring a Klansman at an easel, has been given the AI treatment. Wolfson’s sculpture would’ve made people mad in 2020, when the National Gallery of Art delayed a Guston retrospective in Washington, D.C., amid concerns that viewers wouldn’t understand the painter’s usage of KKK imagery. But in 2026? The Wolfson piece arrives about six years too late to offend anyone.

What does Wolfson think all this work is about? It’s hard to know because he won’t say. But if you ask me, if there is a through-line between Koons, Mapplethorpe, and Guston, it’s that all of these artists have had their art described, whether fairly or not, as déclassé. You might also use a similar adjective for many of Wolfson’s subjects: Bob Dylan (here augmented with AI-generated pecs), Victorian-era pornography, Shrek the Musical, even Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose art was met with a Renoir Sucks at Painting protest movement in 2015.

The show could be taken as an edgelord-y celebration of “bad” aesthetics, here raised to the status of high art. And indeed, the show was teased with a trashy image—a picture of a New York City street lined with waste during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike, that is. But to my mind, the art in this show isn’t truly committed to being bad. Despite their pointy protrusions, the sculptures are not spiky enough to leave a mark; and despite their flirtations with touchy subject matter, none of the works—not even the 9/11 ones—are vulgar enough to get Wolfson in hot water. Exhibiting a pile of hot, steaming garbage might have been more transgressive than showing these sculptures.