DFN Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Jordan Wolfson’s oil paintings, charcoal drawings, and graphite sketches, featuring landscapes, still-life, and interiors. 

Wolfson has long focused on the depiction of light.  While living and exhibiting in Israel from 1992 to 2002, he became intrigued by the contrast between the sunlight in the Middle East and the Northeastern United States, where he currently lives.  As Wolfson says, “In the Middle East, the light is very intense, almost harsh; it goes beyond the beautiful light of the Mediterranean, which floods everything, but is softer, almost like California light.  The light of the Middle East is more severe—it breaks down forms. And it became an important player in my work.”

>Wolfson prepares for his paintings with sketches, which frees him to focus on the sensation of light filling space once he begins to paint.  By depicting familiar, mundane objects that surround him every day—chairs, sofas, tables, bowls—he further narrows his intense focus: as the same objects appear and reappear in his compositions, the viewer becomes aware that the furnishings of a room, the objects in a still life, or the features of a landscape are not so much the painter’s focus as what illuminates them.  The surfaces of Wolfson’s canvases seem to dissolve in a multidimensional scattering of particles of light.

Wolfson’s charcoal drawings reveal the artist’s hand in marks as precise as those of a tailor’s chalk.  The drawings’ dense surfaces have a rhythmic quality that makes them the ideal counterpoint to the paintings, even as they share with the paintings a vibrant sensation of atmospheric space. “I’m interested in the shape of space,” says Wolfson. “There’s an aspect of my work that’s about trying to describe the shape of space and how that changes when a figure is introduced, how a figure charges the space, and how the space remains charged when the figure is no longer there.”

Wolfson is a native of Southern California. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in Fine Art, he received his MFA from Yale University.  He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.  His work is included in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY; the Omanut La'am (Art for the People), in Jerusalem, Israel; and The Ballinglen Archive in Ballycastle, Ireland. This exhibition is his first at DFN, and his first solo show in New York.

A catalogue of Wolfson’s work accompanies the show.