Jonas Wood's drawings, paintings, collage, and prints cross multiple genres including portrait, still life, landscape, and architecture. He weaves the essence of 20th-century modern traditions with his own hard-edged, quasi-abstract cut-out style.
Read MoreIn a conceptual sense, Wood follows early Pop Art's focus on reinvigorating an interest in the everyday things that we overlook, though his approach is less commercial and more personal than Pop Art's.
The artist's imagery is comprised of his day-to-day surroundings. In works such as Group Portrait (2004) and MSF Fish Pot #7 (2016) Wood has incorporated the work and interests of his wife, the Japan-born ceramicist Shio Kusaka. Sharing a studio with her in Culver City, California, many of the artist's myriad paintings of plant pots and other ceramic vessels are modelled on Kusaka's work.
Wood's process typically begins with a collage of photographs that he simplifies into drawn compositions. Space and depth in the artist's artworks are created purely with flat planes of colour and lines. The resulting disconcerting sense of compressed space harks back to the work of the 20th-century modernists he cites as influences, particularly Henri Matisse, who he has made direct visual reference to in works such as Red Pot with Lute Player #2 (2018).
The fractured plains of the Cubists and the minimal, colourful planar approach to portraits reflect the work of Wood's other proclaimed influences: Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Wayne Thiebaud, and Alex Katz.
Sport has been a dominant feature of Wood's work ever since he began making drawings of isolated basketballs and pinning them up on the wall in the mid-2000s. Wood shows his obsessive passion for basketball in works such as Floating Orange Ball (2014), which also pays homage to Jeff Koons' sculpture One Ball Total Equilibrium (Spalding Dr J Silver Series) (1985). The artist avidly watches games and listens to sports commentary or has it running in the background while he works.
Wood has referenced tennis in paintings, drawings and prints since 2011. Watching tennis matches while he works, the artist has painted numerous tennis courts. In the print series 'Four Majors' (2018), Wood portrays the courts of the four tennis Grand Slam tournaments in vibrant multi-colour screenprints.
Sometimes Wood's selected everyday elements are jarringly recombined into works such as Collaboration Appropriation 4 (2015), which brings together the artist's plants and basketball motifs in a surreal composition set against a neutral background.
Wood has also made numerous scenes of architectural exterior and interiors. Schindler Apts (2013) portrays the iconic Los Angeles architecture the artist visits with his architect father when he comes to the city.
Woods interior scenes, such as Alexis' Room (2014), Jungle Kitchen (2017), and Jersey City Apartment (2019), are often characterised by distorted perspectives and an abundance of domestic objects–particularly pot plants.
