JONAS WOOD

Gagosian is pleased to announce Prints 2, an exhibition of over thirty prints made by Jonas Wood between 2018 and 2022. Opening on January 26 at 541 West 24th Street, it is conceived as a companion show to Prints, the first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s printmaking, presented by the gallery in 2018.

The works on view in Prints 2 feature Wood’s perennial motifs–plants, pottery, portraiture, interiors, landscapes, and basketball–reflecting the life of the artist through representations of home, studio, and natural spaces. They are united by Wood’s transformation of subject matter into images with skewed planar space, dense patterning, and vivid colour. Developing his prints in parallel with his paintings, Wood has arrived at linked practices that continually inform one another.

Emphasising the collaborative aspect of printmaking, Wood works with masters of traditional methods who have made innovative contributions to the field. Prints 2 features works made with Aliso Editions, Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions Ltd., Counter Editions, Hamilton Press, Mixografía, and Pace Editions. In addition, Wood publishes and copublishes under his own imprint, WKS Editions.

The stylistic diversity of Wood’s prints results from his experimentation with pictorial effects, processes, and materials, effectively exploring the genre of printmaking itself. The methods used to produce the works in Prints 2 include hard-ground and soft-ground etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcut, as well as various hybrid processes. Wood pairs these techniques with variations in mark making, colour, texture, and density to harness and reveal the characteristics unique to the medium.

Four Landscapes (2020), a suite of woodcuts made with a Japanese ukiyo-e technique, depicts scenes that invoke winter, spring, summer, and fall. Between twelve and twenty hand-carved blocks were used to produce each work’s vibrant colours and interlocked forms, giving these prints an uncanny resemblance to Wood’s use of gouache in his drawings. An edition of large-scale prints, _4 Seasons _(2022), portrays four pairs of basketballs, revisiting a body of work from 2010 and representing the seasons of the year-round sport. Wood’s investigations into the compositional possibilities of printmaking culminate with Kitchen Interior (2022), a 112-colour screen print made over twenty months that combines views of the landscape with a detailed interior enlivened by plants and aspects of domestic life.

Prints 2 is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that includes a conversation between the artist and master printer Ed Hamilton.