PRESENTATION: Jonas Wood

In his boldly colored, graphic works, including paintings, drawings, and prints, Jonas Wood combines art historical references with images of the objects, interiors, and people that comprise the fabric of his life.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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Two exhibitions by Jonas Wood are on show in London. In the one with new painting works we see Wood extend the unmistakable visual language that he has developed over two decades, exploring the dynamics of color, pattern, and space through the treatment of recurring subjects, including plants, family, and interiors. Wood’s compositions are characterized by sudden disjunctures, the collision of contrasting graphic passages, and sly shifts of scale and perspective, all within a compressed picture plane. These qualities grow out of his elaborate studio process: the artist works from photographs that he frequently alters and collages by hand, which, in turn, form the basis for preparatory drawings from which the paintings derive. Through these stages, he transforms volumes, surfaces, and textures into dense blocks of pattern and vibrant color. The works emphasize their own composite nature and pictorial plasticity, with sometimes-destabilizing effects from clashing compositional elements. “Japanese Garden with Temple” (2024), a depiction of a garden in Kyoto, hovers between chaos and order, between excess and economy, as a cacophony of flora and foliage finds an off-kilter sense of balance. In “Self-Portrait with Home Depot Cart”, “Joint, and Phone” (both 2024), which draws on several photographic sources, the figure of the artist—rendered at miniature scale—practically disappears amid the brickwork and camouflage mural on the building behind him and the cluster of houseplants in front, yet he remains the thematic and compositional heart of the painting. As is often true in Wood’s work, the imagery in the exhibition is encoded with personal significance, each painting corresponding to a key element or moment from the artist’s life. While these meanings are not necessarily available to the viewer, a distinctive sense of intimacy pervades much of this body of work. One recognizes it, for example, in the occurrence of domestic interiors: 10 Pigeon Hill Road, which depicts Wood’s childhood home, spatially reimagined, a family portrait hanging on the wall; and Robot and Bear, which features the artist’s dogs (past and present) transported into an apartment from the pages of an interior design magazine, looking out over Los Angeles. A feeling of intimacy is palpable, too, in the portrait of Wood’s wife and their two children, titled “Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks” (2024). Based on a photograph taken in the couple’s shared studio, the painting presents a playful moment, with the kids, in their pajamas, and Kusaka holding up masks improvised from large leaves taken off one of the copious plants around them, as if dressing up as one of his paintings. Other works on view represent family through their creations rather than as themselves: “Wall of Fame” portrays a wall from Wood’s studio crowded with his children’s art; “Shio Shrine” imagines a compact staging of work Kusaka made over the course of two decades; and “Still Life with Coffee and Minibook” features paintings by the children as well as a book of Kusaka’s art, arranged among potted plants and a cup of coffee. These works entail a deft intermixing of subject and object, making and staging, art and life. In the other exhibition, the display includes a suite of five woodcuts of bonsai and a new etching of a domestic interior, installed in the upstairs gallery on Wood’s botanical-print wallpaper. On the ground floor are three prints of flowers—including “White Flower with Grid”, a new sixteen-color screen print published by Counter Editions—all installed on tennis-ball patterned wallpaper designed by the artist. Wood develops his compositions from multiple sources, and his chosen motifs function as vehicles for experimentation with color and pattern, line and geometric shape. His use of plant imagery reflects not only the houseplants that populate his home and studio, but also the climate and cultural identity of his native Los Angeles. Developing his prints in parallel with his paintings, Wood has arrived at linked practices that continually inform one another. In the prints on view, the artist employs the characteristic visual language of his paintings on a smaller scale, with an appealing graphic immediacy.

Photo: Jonas Wood Self-Portrait with Home Depot Cart, Joint, and Phone, 2024. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 90 × 98 inches (228.6 × 248.9 cm), © Jonas Wood. Photo: Marten Elder, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 7/10-23/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, & Gagosian, 28–29 Burlington Arcade, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 7/10-23/11/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/