Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka

Gagosian Hong Kong is pleased to present recent work by Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka. This will be the first exhibition of the artists’ work in Hong Kong.

Wood and Kusaka draw from each other’s work as painter and potter to probe the tensions between representation and expression; precision and chance; influences from art history and life. Kusaka’s porcelain vessels play muse to Wood’s drawn and painted interiors, while conversely their idiosyncratic forms and glazes owe something to his impulsive line. They draw from personal memory and their shared existence as a married couple, his half-objective, half-fictional Los Angeles landscapes and still lifes set in their studio on Blackwelder Street; and her painted patterns that allude to their young daughter’s fascination with dinosaurs.

Wood’s paintings and works on paper display overlapping textures and disorienting compressions of space; the intimate settings invoke the work of forebears such as Matisse and Hockney, yet his distorted verdant rooms possess an affectless cut-out appearance that is all his own. In drawings, collages, watercolors, and paintings, outlines of pots and vases frame landscape and interior imagery. Drawn and painted vessels set against neutral backgrounds contain a sprawling green golf course; a coral reef with exotic fish; a lush garden; a painter’s studio, all scenes that end abruptly at the parameters of the object. Progressions can be traced between exploratory works on paper and final paintings: in Fish Pot and Geranium (2008), Wood incorporates a photograph of swimming koi as the pattern of one vessel; a second is crudely drawn in pencil. He transposes the objects onto canvas in Blue Pot Still Life (2014), in which the highly decorated pots clash with a patterned tablecloth, stacked rolls of masking tape, and multicolored desert plants, a persistent living motif.