Artists

Jonas Wood

Press release

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jonas Wood, opening at the Grosvenor Hill gallery in London on October 7, 2024. These works see Wood extend the unmistakable visual language that he has developed over two decades, exploring the dynamics of color, pattern, and space through the treatment of recurring subjects, including plants, family, and interiors. At once exuberant and obsessive, intimate and imaginative, the paintings on view—like much of Wood’s work—are marked by the interplay of apparent opposites.

Wood’s compositions are characterized by sudden disjunctures, the collision of contrasting graphic passages, and sly shifts of scale and perspective, all within a compressed picture plane. These qualities grow out of his elaborate studio process: the artist works from photographs that he frequently alters and collages by hand, which, in turn, form the basis for preparatory drawings from which the paintings derive. Through these stages, he transforms volumes, surfaces, and textures into dense blocks of pattern and vibrant color.

The works emphasize their own composite nature and pictorial plasticity, with sometimes-destabilizing effects from clashing compositional elements. Japanese Garden with Temple (all works 2024), a depiction of a garden in Kyoto, hovers between chaos and order, between excess and economy, as a cacophony of flora and foliage finds an off-kilter sense of balance. In Self-Portrait with Home Depot Cart, Joint, and Phone, which draws on several photographic sources, the figure of the artist—rendered at miniature scale—practically disappears amid the brickwork and camouflage mural on the building behind him and the cluster of houseplants in front, yet he remains the thematic and compositional heart of the painting.