Jonas Wood

Comprising 100 works on paper, Drawings: 2003–2023 is the most expansive collection of Jonas Wood's artistic practice to date. This body of work traces the artist's trajectory back to his early days in Los Angeles, where he worked alongside painter Laura Owens and sculptor Matt Johnson. It was during this formative period that Wood's distinct visual language began to take shape: a language that would come to define his mature practice. Drawing played a central role in Wood's process, serving as both preparatory sketches for his collages and paintings, as well as independent works of art in their own right. At the core of Wood's prolific output lies a deep appreciation for the handmade—a reverence reflected in his engagement with found photographs, manual projectors and half-erased pencil sketches. Although rendered in a flattened perspective, the resulting tableaux are deeply layered, revealing traces of the artist's hand, miscellaneous references and the transformative nature of various artistic media. The comprehensive catalog features an essay by Douglas Fogle and a conversation between Laura Owens and the artist.
The Los Angeles-based artist Jonas Wood (born 1977) creates paintings, drawings and prints, which mostly comprise intricate still lifes and interior domestic scenes. Throughout his compositions, the artist draws from art history, memory, and the people, objects and interiors that comprise his life. His work is boldly colored, detailed and graphic, and often features basketballs, ceramics and lush plants.

This volume provides a concise, comprehensive and intimate look at Jonas Wood’s 2022 solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. With illuminating texts by Wood that incorporate process notes, references and thoughts about his practice and artmaking in general, this richly illustrated monograph shows how he plans and executes his celebrated paintings from his own point of view.
Jonas Wood: Plants and Animals features large full-color plates of the 14 paintings in the exhibition plus installation views and dozens of contextualizing images. These include drawings, collages, prints, photographs, previous paintings, research materials and studio shots; many are never-before-seen selections from Wood’s personal archive. Plants and Animals is a vivid and entertaining immersion in the world of an artist whose evocations of daily life, memories and invented scenes are both familiar and surprising, and whose paintings contain innumerable visual worlds of their own.
Jonas Wood was born in Boston in 1977. He has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (2019); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands (with Shio Kusaka, 2017); Lever House, New York (2014); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010). His work is in the permanent collections of many institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Clippings is a follow-up to Los Angeles–based artist Jonas Wood’s (born 1977) previous publication, Pots. This new volume brings together paintings of “clippings” of plants. Plants have long been a subject of Wood’s work, whether on their own, within paintings of interiors or alongside portraits of people. In Clippings, Wood renders segments of plants in the colorful, graphic flatness that has become synonymous with his painting style.

The latest book from Los Angeles-based artist Jonas Wood (born 1977) follows the style of his previous publications Sports Book and Interiors, this time taking up the subject of portraiture. Portraits compiles the many works completed over Wood’s career, done in a variety of media, and with a range of subjects and sitters, including paintings of artist friends, self-portraits, intimate familial moments in domestic interiors and the artist’s own cultural and sports heroes, from basketball players and boxers to Philip Guston and Pablo Picasso—though Wood’s esteem for these figures is beside the point, as he notes: "I don’t depict only those athletes who have meaning for me. Sometimes it is about the images being interesting, or that I like the color of the card, and sometimes it is about loving the athlete." Wood’s subjects are presented in bright light with lively color, graphic flatness and minute detail rendered impeccably.

Jonas Woods: Portraits reveals an intimate look at the life of an artist at the forefront of contemporary painting.