Jordan Doner: A Revolution in Luxury

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (January 5, 2015) - Serge Sorokko Gallery is pleased to announce the U.S. premiere of Jordan Doner: A Revolution in Luxury, a site-specific installation featuring large-scale color photographs. sculpture, and video works. The show marks the New York based artist's first exhibition at the Sorokko Gallery, and in San Francisco. A private reception for the artist will be held on January 29, 2015 and the exhibition will run from January 30 through March 8, 2015.

Jordan Doner's distinctive art blurs the lines between installation, performance, and commercial branding. A Revolution in Luxury explores and critiques the modern myths and surreal manifestations of luxury culture and counter culture revolution. Doner's sumptuous photographs destroy the fictional utopian concept of ideal perfection used to market the promises of materialism.

In 2009, Jordan Doner gained notoriety with his series, A Revolution in Luxury I, in which the artist literally blows up limited edition Louis Vuitton handbags by Haruki Murakami and Richard Prince. Documenting each explosion with photography and video, Doner creates highly stylized photographs that capture the incidental compositions of destruction; dancing fragments of designer monograms float in mid-air with traces of gunpowder against a minimalist backdrop of sky. Doner's work draws inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 cult classic "Zabriskie Point," a film about late-sixties American counterculture, culminating in a fantastic explosion.

The multimedia installation will include the artist's newest works from his series, A Revolution in Luxury II (2013-2014), where Doner continues his destruction of consumable perfection, loading designer handbags with real and perceived symbols of wealth and sexuality-sparking jewelry, lipstick and even breast implants-before blowing them to smithereens. In this series, the artist also explores the pantheon of contemporary artists, exploding scale replicas of Donald Judd's volumetric "boxes" and also an Equilibrium Tank sculpture by Jeff Koons. Debris from the destruction will be displayed alongside the resulting artworks in a near-forensic manner, along with non-photographic assemblages and sculptures.

In the Staged Utopias: Landscapes, Lifestyle, and Artifacts (2009-2014) series, Doner creates fictional landscapes. Backlit parachutes are reflected and refracted with mirrors and photographed; the artist then crafts wall sculptures, mixing actual parachutes with his photographs to create his "utopias" drawing attention to the fading distinctions between the projected materialistic fantasies of a luxury class and our everyday reality.

Jordan Doner lives and works in New York City. His photographs, conceptual mixed media works, and industrial designs are in major permanent collections including, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. His art have been exhibited at MoMA PS1 Museum and Art Basel, Miami. His artwork has been reviewed in the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, The Huffington Post, and The Miami Herald Art Basel Edition. Additionally, his work as a fashion photographer has been published on the covers of multiple international editions of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, as well as Interview, Wallpaper, V, Visionaire, GQ, and Jalouse.

Jordan Doner graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Philosophy. He studied photography at the International Center of Photography, New York and Digital Media at Parsons School of Design, New York, and Film and Video production at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Serge Sorokko founded the Serge Sorokko Gallery in 1984, building a solid reputation on its collection of post-war and contemporary works by internationally recognized artists. Located in the heart of Union Square in downtown San Francisco, the gallery has introduced collectors to established European and American artists such as Damien Hirst, Sol LeWitt, Donald Sultan, Sean Scully, Antoni Tapies, and Jannis Kounellis.

The gallery has fostered many emerging artists, offering a range of original art from painting and sculpture to works on paper and photography. In 2000, Serge Sorokko Editions began publishing the BAM Photography Portfolios I, II and III; featuring the work of Richard Avedon, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Sophie Calle, James Casebere, Rineke Dijkstra, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Candida Höfer, Sally Mann, Richard Prince, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Nicholas Nixon, Catherine Opie, Massimo Vitali, James Welling, Adam Fuss, Jack Pierson, Annie Leibovitz, William Wegman, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Thomas Struth.

The Serge Sorokko Gallery has also played a pivotal role in organizing many of the first cultural exchanges between the United States and post-Soviet Russia, including the museum exhibition curated by art critic Donald Kuspit, Painting Beyond the Death of Painting (1989), of celebrated New York artists in Moscow.