American artist Jonathan Lasker, widely regarded as one of the most influential abstract painters in the United States, starts off the new season at Galleri Lars Bohman. In this his third exhibition at the gallery he shows six new paintings, all from this year.
In these new works Lasker continues to explore painting in terms of its most basic elements: colour, line, texture and form, and deals with the complexity and the complementarity of the figure and ground relationship. The exuberance and playfulness of his paintings belie their origin and play with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions. Seemingly spontaneous and impulsive, they are, in fact, the result of an exacting method of preparatory stages; the compositions are meticulously worked out in advance in small-scale detailed sketches and studies, before being transposed on to often large-scale canvases.
Dr. David Moos, curator of “Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity Paintings from the 1990s” describes Lasker’s work as “a staged drama that rigorously analyzes the terms of artistic invention. His dialectic approach - spanning the gulf that separates Abstract Expressionism from minimalism - is accurately reflected in Lasker’s unique working method.”
Born in Jersey City in 1948, Jonathan Lasker lives and works in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and later studied painting at the California Institute of the Arts during the 70s.
He has exhibited extensively in the United States and in Europe. “Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity Paintings from the 1990s”, a solo travelling retrospective organised by the Birmingham Museum of Art, toured four major cities in the USA and Canada, 1999-2000. Lasker’s work has been the subject of a large retrospective that has toured major European institutions, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He has also had several solo gallery exhibitions at Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris L.A. Louver Gallery, California, Solodad Lorenzo Gallery, Madrid. He has also participated in important group exhibitions at such venues as the Hayward Gallery, London, Documenta IX, Kassel, the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Kunsthalle Zurich, the Witte de With, Rotterdam, and the Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden.
In these new works Lasker continues to explore painting in terms of its most basic elements: colour, line, texture and form, and deals with the complexity and the complementarity of the figure and ground relationship. The exuberance and playfulness of his paintings belie their origin and play with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions. Seemingly spontaneous and impulsive, they are, in fact, the result of an exacting method of preparatory stages; the compositions are meticulously worked out in advance in small-scale detailed sketches and studies, before being transposed on to often large-scale canvases.
Dr. David Moos, curator of “Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity Paintings from the 1990s” describes Lasker’s work as “a staged drama that rigorously analyzes the terms of artistic invention. His dialectic approach - spanning the gulf that separates Abstract Expressionism from minimalism - is accurately reflected in Lasker’s unique working method.”
Born in Jersey City in 1948, Jonathan Lasker lives and works in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and later studied painting at the California Institute of the Arts during the 70s.
He has exhibited extensively in the United States and in Europe. “Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity Paintings from the 1990s”, a solo travelling retrospective organised by the Birmingham Museum of Art, toured four major cities in the USA and Canada, 1999-2000. Lasker’s work has been the subject of a large retrospective that has toured major European institutions, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He has also had several solo gallery exhibitions at Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris L.A. Louver Gallery, California, Solodad Lorenzo Gallery, Madrid. He has also participated in important group exhibitions at such venues as the Hayward Gallery, London, Documenta IX, Kassel, the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Kunsthalle Zurich, the Witte de With, Rotterdam, and the Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden.