BOOK:Jonas Wood, Phaidon Publications

In his boldly colored, graphic works (including paintings, drawings, and prints) Jonas Wood combines art historical references with images of the objects, interiors, and people that comprise the fabric of his life. Translating the three-dimensional world around him into flat color and line, he confounds expectations of scale and vantage point. The first monograph on the artist’s work  brings together his most significant paintings and drawings. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into the vast array of his sources, which include family photographs, found imagery, baseball cards, and other people’s art, including the ceramics of Shio Kusaka. Jonas Wood received a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, in 1999, majoring in psychology and minoring in studio art, then attended the University of Washington, Seattle, where he received an MFA in painting and drawing in 2002. Shortly after art school, Wood moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for the Laura Owens for a few years. Wood currently shares a studio with artist Shio Kusaka, his wife since 2002, and the pair often work in tandem, motifs migrating from Kusaka’s ceramic vessels to Wood’s paintings and back again. Common subjects include plants, portraits, and sports imagery, all of which come together in Wood’s lush interiors and intricate still lifes. He and Kusaka also incorporate imagery from their expansive art collection including works by Alighiero Boetti, Michael Frimkess and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Mark Grotjahn, and Ed Ruscha as well as from their children’s storybooks and drawings.-Efi Michalarou