Featured image: The Czar's Challenge, John Wolfer, 2024, mixed media, 16 x 32 in. / 40.64 x 81.28 cm.
John Wolfer’s assemblage paintings operate at the intersection of narrative, history, and play.
John Wolfer creates assemblage paintings that merge fables, artifacts, and found objects into layered visual riddles.
Combining acrylics with found objects, screen prints, and unexpected materials, his works create layered visual riddles. Each piece invokes both folk tradition and contemporary culture, weaving fables, relics, and archetypes into modern compositions that read like visual puzzles waiting to be solved.
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Bound to Dance, John Wolfer, 2019, acrylic and mixed media on board, 14 x 22 in. / 35.56 x 55.88 cm.
In Bound to Dance, a toy-like red form labeled “FIDDLE” shares space with the silhouette of a crow, a pixelated portrait, and a yellow twig affixed directly to the surface. The composition blurs the line between painting and sculpture, presenting an uncanny constellation of objects that feel both familiar and estranged. The crow, often a symbol of cunning or death, collides with the childlike play implied by “fiddle,” producing an unsettling ambiguity. Wolfer situates meaning in this dissonance, leaving the viewer suspended between humor and menace.
Rivers Don't Always Give Axes (or Three Clever Brothers), John Wolfer, 2020, mixed media, 27 x 22 in. / 68.58 x 55.88 cm.
This work directly references Aesop’s fable of the woodcutter and his lost axe, which extols honesty over greed. Wolfer paints three shimmering axe heads, gold, silver, and iron, arranged like scientific specimens with their atomic weights listed below. A Mercury hubcap anchors the lower half, collapsing myth into industry and turning allegory into artifact. By treating morality tales as objects of taxonomy, Wolfer asks whether timeless truths retain their weight in a mechanized and commodified culture.
The Miller's Daughter, John Wolfer, 2019, acrylic and found objects on board, 14 x 22 in. / 35.56 x 55.88 cm.
In The Miller’s Daughter, Wolfer assembles a pixelated stag, vintage coins, a chain-linked pair of doll hands, and a plaque bearing the name “Goodman.” The result reads like a fragmented folktale told through currency, childhood relics, and mythic animals. The title recalls fairy tales where bargains and lineage define fate, while the playful yet eerie objects suggest cycles of value and inheritance, what is gained, what is lost, and what lingers.
Together, these works highlight Wolfer’s ongoing exploration of how stories, symbols, and artifacts carry meaning across time. Whether invoking fables, currency, or cultural detritus, his art suspends us in a liminal space where objects refuse to settle into one definition. Wolfer’s practice insists that truth, like myth, is multifaceted, something we must constantly renegotiate in fragments.
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Three Brothers (Mercury's Test), John Wolfer, 2024, mixed media, 21 x 58 in. / 53.34 x 147.32 cm.
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