Jonas Wood is definitely having a moment. After opening his first museum retrospective at the Dallas Art Museum back in March, he now has two major shows happening across the United States with the opening of new works at Gagosian Gallery at 555 West 24th Street in NYC. In what has been an incredible output over the past decade, with Jonas Wood evolving to his brilliant sports portraits to incredibly detailed paintings of rooms, vases and other still-life objects, he has quickly become one of America's premier painters.
As the gallery notes: "One room of this exhibition is dedicated to a series of new paintings of architectural interiors and exteriors. Wood composes these through a process of layering and collaging, using photography, projection, drawing, and then painting. Sources are translated and mixed into generations, which then become the basis for the large-scale paintings. The “seams” are dissolved in the final work, even if the impression of an assemblage remains palpable. Images of Wood’s family members and domestic surroundings recur in his paintings, revealing the importance of familial dynamics in shaping time, space, and identity. For example, Young Architect (2019) is based on a photograph from the mid-sixties in which Wood’s father stands on a construction site where timber beams cross over each other, their grain echoing the forms made by the living trees visible behind. In Inglewood Listing (2019), Wood has painted the quiet scene of a room, based on a photograph from the original real estate listing of his home from the early 2010s, which contains similarly grained timber beams and green foliage. Set more than fifty years after the photograph taken of his father, it contains a sense of autobiographical nostalgia rendered through the depiction of living space."
All images courtesy of Gagosian.com
