ART CITIES:N.York-Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood takes the motifs of interior domestic spaces and landscapes as his subject, using a range of formal techniques to create multiple disorienting perspectives that alter the viewer’s expectations of the familiar and natural.His works construct complex forms and perspectives using overlays of simple shapes and flat color, drawing together Modernist Abstraction with pop-inflected Figuration.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo Gagosian Gallery Archive

Jonas Wood’s solo exhibition “Prints” at Gagosian Gallery, is the artist’s first survey of prints. Wood’s use of teeming detail, often serves the paradoxical purpose of capturing the feeling of empty spaces; many of his works in these typologies are notable for their conspicuous lack of people, even when they highlight the remnants of human presence. Tracing the evolution of Wood’s unique visual vocabulary through his printing practice, the exhibition reveals his deep attunement to the interplay of content and form, line and shape, color and space. In more than 50 limited edition prints produced between 2004 and 2018, Wood explores visual themes from museum interiors to tennis courts and logos, as well as ceramics that are often based on the work of his wife, the sculptor Shio Kusaka.  As in his murals and paintings on canvas, the immediacy of everyday life mixes with references to art history. Depictions of pots and vases themselves depict verdant interiors, silhouettes of toy dinosaurs, and references to Wood’s predecessors, including Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha. The prints produced in the print studios of Cirrus Editions Ltd., Counter Editions, Hamilton Press, Wavelength Press, and more; also attest to the importance of collaboration in Wood’s work, as many of their featured motifs emerge out of dialogues with fellow artists and friends. Though not inherently mathematical in composition, the artist’s paintings often contain numerous intersecting geometrical elements, as objects and patterns become flattened in his artistic process, which involves creating drawings of photographs of his subjects that eventually serve as the primary models for his works. In creating works from the items and environments around him, whether they are sports imagery, animals, or furniture, Wood extracts the beauty from the ordinary, proving that there’s more to the everyday than meets the eye.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration 5/4-25/5/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com