Jonas Wood was the first artist we can remember that painted large-scale portraits of our collective childhood imagery of sports icons. At the time, they felt like a breath of fresh air, a sort of ideal representation of those passing memories of both the most famous athletes and those often forgotten mythical figures that you saw on basketball or baseball cards. It seemed out of fashion for the time (thinking of his Sports Book in 2009), but Wood was tapping into a nuance of still-life painting that transformed and reimagined how painting would be look like for the next 10 years.

As time has gone by, and now in the over 30 works on view at the Dallas Museum of Art, Wood’s first major museum survey, he has refined those early sports works into lush still-lifes that immerse themselves in a suburban memory with incredible detail and signature painting strokes. The words that both the museum and we keep coming back to is personal and universal. Those living rooms look like the places your aunts and uncles lived in, the portraits look like your daily ritual of looking in the mirror, the lush works of plants look like a Southern California dream. For the Dallas show, Wood presents over 13 years of his output, and the growth of his own family and career trajectory. Like Hockney before him, or even to a certain extent, you may be looking into the artist’s personal life, but in many ways, you’ve been there, too, and you will keep going back. —Evan Pricco

Jonas Wood's work will be on display at the Dallas Museum of Art from March 24—July 14, 2019.