ART-PRESENTATION: Jonas Wood
Known for his colorful and compressed depictions of the people, places, and things that populate his daily life in Los Angeles, Jonas Wood creates works that bear clear traces of his biography in both form and content. The intimate settings invoke the work of forebears such as Henri Matisse and David Hockney, yet his distorted verdant rooms possess an affectless cut-out appearance all his own.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) Archive
Bringing together approximately 35 works across 13 years of Jonas Wood’s career, the first major solo Museum exhibition of his work is on show at Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) , the exhibition traces the artist’s fascination with psychology, memory, and the self to shed light on a practice that is both deeply personal and universal. Known for his colorful and compressed depictions of the people, places, and things that populate his daily life in Los Angeles, Jonas Wood creates works that bear clear traces of his biography in both form and content. Wood’s grandfather was an amateur painter who his Collection included works by notable modernists such as Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. These artists, in addition to other modern masters ranging from Henri Matisse to David Hockney, have inspired Wood’s signature use of playful geometries, bold colors, and a distinct graphic style. Wood’s family members are recurrent characters in his paintings, as are the ceramics produced by his wife, artist Shio Kusaka, stressing the importance of familial dynamics in shaping identity, a notion central to his approach. While the artist’s works are often based on intense real-life observation, the worlds they depict are ultimately fictive, subjected to a process of manipulation through preparatory photo collages. Through this process, the places and things that the artist depicts become personifications, and the intimate becomes public, an intertwining of fact, fiction, and deeper meaning that has intensified in the digital age. The exhibition juxtaposes works across subject matter and chronology, including snowy New England landscapes and Japanese gardens, still lifes abundant with plant matter, richly decorated modernist interiors, and portraits of the artist and his loved ones—to provide insight into Wood’s willingness to engage with traditional genres of painting while simultaneously exploring distinctly contemporary ideas grounded in his own signature brand of image making. Examples of works featured in this exhibition that questions the relationship between reality and illusion include: “Face Painting” (2014), an iPhone captures Wood’s daughter making herself up in a mirror, depicted in the act of art making, a familial riff on Wood’s portraits of artists Mark Grotjahn, Akio Takamori, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, and Philip Guston included in the show. In “The Bat/Bar Mitzvah Weekend” (2016), a painting based on a photograph by Elsa Dorfman, past photographs of the family members are placed at their feet as they pose for the current session. Both are captured in the painting, making it a commentary on the relationship between painting and photography, family and aging. The passage of time is similarly captured in “The Still Life” (2007), an early work in a genre for which Wood is now well known. A skull lies atop a plinth in an illusion to the art historical motif of memento mori.
Info: Curator: Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, Duration: 24/3-14/7/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.dma.org
