Jonas Wood

7 Oct-23 Nov 2024

Overview

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jonas Wood. These works 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. At once exuberant and obsessive, intimate and imaginative, the paintings on view—like much of Wood’s work—are marked by the interplay of apparent opposites.

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 (all works 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, 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 (the artist Shio Kusaka) and their two children, titled Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks. 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.    

Concurrent with the exhibition, Wood is taking over Gagosian Burlington Arcade from October 7 to November 23, 2024. Wallpaper and prints by the artist are on view in the gallery, while posters, artist-designed hats, and books, including a new catalogue that accompanies Wood’s exhibition at Grosvenor Hill, are available in the Gagosian Shop.

The Winter 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly features a text on Woods by Los Angeles writer and curator Eli Diner.

Jonas Wood was born in 1977 in Boston, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include Hammer Projects: Jonas Wood, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Clippings, Lever House Art Collection, New York (2013–14); and Shio Kusaka & Jonas Wood, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2017–18). A mid-career survey of Wood’s work was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019. Public commissions include Shelf Still Life, High Line Art, New York (2014); LAXART Façade, Los Angeles (2014); and Still Life with Two Owls (MOCA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016–18).

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