Gagosian is pleased to announce the first survey of prints by Jonas Wood.
In Wood’s domestic worlds of plants and household objects, vases, flowers, and basketballs overlap within skewed perspectival schemes, bristling with an abstract charge and confounding expectations of scale, perspective, and color. Tracing the evolution of Wood’s unique visual vocabulary through his printing practice, this exhibition reveals his deep attunement to the interplay of content and form, line and shape, color and space.
In recent years Wood’s distinctive still lifes have taken on a monumental scale, covering the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and stretching over the High Line in New York. In his prints, however, his vivid graphics can be observed at human scale. This print survey demonstrates his intuitive synthesis of the jumble of everyday life into a series of heterotopic yet cohesive wholes. His scenography, bricolage, and patterning contain gestures toward narratives both real and imagined, while maintaining a graphic deftness and lively sense of wit.
In more than fifty 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, and Wavelength Press, among others—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.
Coinciding with the exhibition, Gagosian Shop will present an installation and selection of objects by Jonas Wood.
