Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood was born in 1977 in Boston and received his BA in Psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. His interest in human psychology has been influential for his artistic practice, especially throughout his MFA at the University of Washington. His interest is reflected in his frequent subject matter of domestic interiors, still-lifes and portraits that strike as mundane, but often feature distorted shapes and an altered spatial perspective that is typical of Wood’s visual language.

After completing his MFA, Wood settled in Los Angeles and started working for the prolific painter Laura Owens. There, he shared a studio with his future wife, ceramic artist Shio Kusaka, whose work has been a pivotal influence for Wood throughout his career. The artist’s first solo exhibition was hosted by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2010, followed by a series of public commissions and murals such as Shelf Still Life in New York on Chelsea’s High Line in 2014 and Still Life with Two Owls on the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA in 2016.

In representing interior spaces, the artist is inspired by the likes of David Hockney, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh. His colourful, large-scale paintings in acrylic and oil merge 20th century Cubist tropes with contemporary subject matter. His work ties together different techniques and spatial experimentations, creating fragmented, uncanny compositions from layered sketches that play with the viewer’s expectation of familiar spaces and objects. This can be seen in his celebrated painting Ovitz’s Library (2013). The most iconic motif appearing throughout his works are plants, flowers and pots as symbols of domestic space and the still life tradition. Wood often blends the boundaries between exterior and interior space through distorted perspective, as seen in his work Maritime Sunset Landscape Pot (2014), showing an evening cityscape within a plant vase.

Wood’s initial commissions were followed by important exhibitions like Blackwelder in Gagosian Hong Kong (2015), which was the first duo exhibition showing his and Kusaka’s works together. The pair’s first shared institutional exhibition was hosted by Museum Voorlinden, in the Netherlands (2017). Wood’s practice is characterised by different artistic phases, within which he focuses on one specific subject matter. These periods are reflected in his exhibition publications such as Interiors (2012), Pots (2015) and Portraits (2016), featuring portraits of friends, family and sports figures. Clippings (2017) is a collection of paintings of still lifes.

Wood recently had a major retrospective at the Dallas Museum in 2019 and a solo exhibition of his large-scale paintings of tennis courts at Gagosian gallery in New York in 2021. His work can be found in public collections internationally, including in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angelees, the Saatchi Gallery in London and the MOMA and Guggenheim Museums in New York City.