Jonas Wood Signed Collage with Hand Colored Pencil on Book Cover

Artist: Jonas Wood
Title: Untitled
Medium: Collage with hand colored pencil on book cover
Size: Sheet: 11 1/2" x 10 1/4" ; Frame: 13 3/4" x 12 1/4" x 2 3/4"
Edition: X/21
Year: 2019
Inscription: Signed and dated on inside cover
Year: Condition: Very good condition overall; please request condition report for full details
Documentation: Gallery certificate of authenticity along with previous receipt of sale from Gagosian Gallery

Jonas Wood uses his practice as a visual diary that captures his history and the beauty of ordinary everyday settings and objects. His artworks combine recognizable imagery with a personal approach that juxtaposes the new and familiar. Illustrations of American contemporary life combine abstraction, figuration, the graphic style of Pop Art, and the fragmented perspectives of Analytic Cubism. His artworks offer an updated and modernized version of traditional painting genres.

Prints create by Wood primarily focus on household objects and plants. They play with the perception of content and form, color and space, line and shape. Typically combining furniture with plants, Wood’s prints are rich with overlapping textures that blend items within the composition. Furthermore, his printmaking highlights his mark-making technique present in his paintings.

"Untitled" is on the cover of the book Jonas Wood: Prints, a monograph of the first survey of his printmaking published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at Gagosian in 2018. The artwork reinvents an image originally part of Wood’s portfolio Eight Etchings, which documented his printmaking experience alongside legendary printmaker Jacob Samuel. The original image captured a domestic landscape filled with plants in a disorienting manner. However, in this version, Wood creates a collage with colored pencils. Vibrant orange hearts and a La Croix can juxtapose the black and white interior still-life.

"Untitled" includes a gallery certificate of authenticity and previous sale receipt from Gagosian Gallery. The work is signed and dated on the inside cover of the book. The piece is in very good condition overall. Please request a condition report for full details.

Jonas Wood Biography

Jonas Wood is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. His paintings offer an updated and modernized version of traditional painting genres. Often referred to as a visual diary, his artworks capture his personal history and the beauty of ordinary everyday settings and objects.

His acrylic and oil paintings uniquely capture contemporary life through multiple points of view created with layers of geometric shapes, patterns, and colors. These fragmented yet figurative works allude to his memories and visions. Wood uses his day to day interactions and surrounding environments as a primary source of influence. His preliminary collage-based studies break apart and reassemble images from photographs. Furthermore, he combines recognizable imagery with a personal approach that juxtaposes the new and familiar.

Painting portraits, still lifes, and intimate interior scenes, Wood’s diverse painting themes often focus on a single subject. His imagery includes basketball paraphernalia, potted plants, animals, and furniture. Some of the recurring figures present in his works include ceramic vessels or potted plants derived from the artworks of ceramicist Shio Kusaka, his wife, and their shared collection featuring Ruby Neri, Magdalena Suarez, Michael Frimkess, and Akio Takamori.

Wood received a BA in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Washington. His paintings subtly reference psychological themes as he highlights the ties between the past and present. Some of his artistic influences include the art of Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, and Henri Matisse. Additionally, David Hockney’s suburban subjects presented in a dreamlike manner inform his depiction of suburbia.

Wood’s slightly abstract painting style combines the graphic style of Pop Art and the fragmented perspectives of Analytic Cubism. He embraces figuration and abstraction through a distortion of scale and ignoring the natural colors of objects. His bright and colorful palette emphasizes patterns and distorted shapes. Intersecting geometric forms painted against monochromatic backgrounds help achieve the flattened aspect characteristic of his art. However, his use of flatforms still creates a sense of depth that further enhances the abstraction.

In 2019, Phaidon published the first monograph dedicated to his practice. His artworks have been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US and abroad. Additionally, they are part of the permanent collections of notable cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fundación Jumex, Dallas Museum of Art, and MoMA.