Jonas Wood
Jonas Wood is an American artist best known for his blending of analytic cubism and contemporary Pop Art in his renderings of interior spaces, bold graphic potted plants and professional sports. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Wood graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in in 1999 in New York, and later received his MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2002. He is a Los Angeles based artist and shares his studio with wife and ceramicist Shio Kusaka, who have a mutual influence on each other’s artworks. Wood is primarily a painter working in acrylic and oil paint, and his artworks depict objects and settings from his daily life and contemporary American life, including portraits, interior scenes, living rooms, and still lives of plants and his wife’s ceramic vessels.
Wood’s oeuvre is deeply influenced by art history, from a Modernist and Cubist style to vibrant Pop Art. Playing homage to Matisse and Picasso, Wood employs the modernist tradition of flatness of the picture plane, as he translates the three-dimensional world into his dynamic compositions. The pictorial elements, layers of patterns, and fractured planes are produced from Wood’s artistic process of painting from a drawing or photograph of a collage he made. These partially abstract renderings emphasize geometric patterns, forms and bright colors, while maintaining a flattened space. Wood’s captivating interior scenes and brightly colored linear compositions reference Pop artists such as David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz and Lucian Freud. His work also reconsiders the golden era of 20th century American painting, which includes artists Grant Wood and Edward Hopper, who rendered figurative and representational scenes of mundane America.
Jonas Wood’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His artwork resides in private and permanent collections worldwide.
