Jonas Wood

Gagosian is pleased to present new drawings by Jonas Wood at Eden Rock in St. Barts.

In his ongoing investigation of his intimate environment, Wood fuses artistic influences as diverse as the domestic interiors of Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and David Hockney to Chinese and Japanese still-life scenes, ancient pottery, and the guileless textiles of Josef Frank. Sampling subjects from his own photographs, he reiterates them through layered drawings, some of which he develops into paintings. Filling compressed picture planes with figures, plants, and household objects, Wood reimagines the world as a variegated collage of overlapping patterns, flatly rendered. Painted outlines of pots and vases—often based on the work of his wife Shio Kusaka and fueled by their shared interest in the history of ceramics—contain landscape and interior imagery, while verdant interiors possess an affectless cut-out appearance.

In the exhibited drawings, Wood recycles “clippings” from his own paintings, still-life sketches and photographs of exotic plants and sets them into formal play. Patterned, overlapping petals and leaves coalesce into vibrant abstractions. Clipping Index 1 (2015), Wood’s first multi-part work, is a suite of seven large-scale drawings in gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper. Plucked from the context of their previously depicted maternal plants, sections of bromeliads, orchids and succulents become autonomous, unpredictable characters. Rendered in a bright palette or grayscale, close-up or suspended in space, they comprise a diverse garden of lyrical transformations.