New Paintings by Jonas Wood

An exhibition of Jonas Wood's new paintings opened last night at the new David Kordansky Gallery in Hollywood. Make sure to stop in and see this one while it's still up, as Wood is one of our favorite artists working in Los Angeles today. Keep reading to view the new works, and read the official press release...

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce a major exhibition by Jonas Wood at the gallery’s new location at 5130 W. Edgewood Place. The exhibition will open on Saturday, November 8, 2014 and will continue on view through January 10, 2015. Extending across three exhibition spaces at the gallery’s new building, this is Wood’s most expansive and diverse show to date. Each room will focus on a genre within his painting practice: plants, sports cards, and portraits. Also featured will be a salon-style installation of works on paper, dating from 2007 to the present, closely related to the paintings on view.

Among the paintings, Wood will debut a new series of large-scale pictures of solitary plants in painted pots. Referred to as “landscape pots”, each image pairs a “clipping”—a plant form isolated from a preceding work by Wood—with a vessel shape that is, itself, a painted view—a cityscape, park, or jungle-like foliage. Compositing images of objects, perspectival spaces and external surfaces, as well as textures, scales, and temporalities, the pots exemplify Wood’s montage-based practice, and its evocation of nostalgia and the uncanny.

Accordingly, Wood increasingly draws not only from his growing collection of photographic images and “readymade” portraits such as trading cards, but also the history of his own practice. In tandem with his paintings, he has produced a breadth of preparatory and companion works on paper, through which he resolves elements of each composition and which he later mines for future works. In this sense, the exhibition’s installation of drawings approximates a view of his studio, functioning as a matrix to understand Wood’s process, and also his greater visual universe.

Over the past decade, Wood has developed a singular style of representational image-making. Working from a vast archive of photographs—shot and collected by the artist or sourced via the Internet—Wood reinterprets everyday views from his life. Domestic interiors, televised sports, and snapshots of family members become observational events and opportunities for the construction of line and shape. In each work, he collages flat, graphic color, and freehand geometric patterns, synthesizing discontinuous views of his subjects. His paintings remain legible as representational images while skewing towards abstraction. For instance, Wood’s daughter’s painted face, the flowers of an orchid, and the musculature of Manute Bol’s arm appear equally as intimate portrayals, kaleidoscopic visions, and novel painterly events.

An accompanying, fully illustrated catalogue, designed by Brian Roettinger and the artist, will be published in late 2014.

Jonas Wood (b. 1977) has recently presented solo exhibitions of his work at the Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles; the High Line, New York; the Lever House Art Collection, New York; Anton Kern Gallery, New York;
Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions
include Greater L.A., New York; Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Newtonland: Orbits, Ellipses and Other Places of Activity, White Flag Projects, St. Louis. Wood’s work is included in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the MCA Chicago, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. In November 2014 he will debut a new façade and billboard with LA>