JONAS WOOD

Early Years

Jonas Wood was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1977. He earned a BA in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1999, followed by an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2002. After relocating to Los Angeles, Wood worked as a studio assistant for painter Laura Owens and shared a studio with the ceramic artist Shio Kusaka, now his wife and frequent collaborator.

Wood credits his grandfather's art collection—which included works by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, and Andy Warhol—as one of his earliest exposures to modern and contemporary art. That collection, along with a lifetime of accumulated visual references, informs the dense visual layering in his artwork today.

Artworks

Jonas Wood's art is defined by bold colour, compressed space, and a graphic flattening of perspective that merges abstraction with representation. His paintings, drawings, and prints reimagine everyday scenes and personal references through a highly distinctive visual language. Built from photographs, collages, and memory, his artworks blur the line between lived experience and constructed imagery, often exploring themes of domesticity, family, and the passage of time.

Interiors and Still Lifes

Among Wood's most celebrated works are his large-scale still lifes and interior scenes, which frequently incorporate houseplants, bookshelves, rugs, artworks, and ceramics. These pieces are closely tied to his home and studio environment, particularly the ceramic vessels made by his wife and collaborator, Shio Kusaka. In works like Large Shelf Still Life (2017), Japanese Garden 3 (2018), and Interiors with Large Ceramic Pot (2014), Wood creates densely layered compositions that celebrate the familiarity of the domestic while reworking it into something almost surreal. His frequent use of flattened perspective and patterned surfaces links his practice to modernist painters like Matisse, but the subject matter remains deeply personal and contemporary.

Portraiture and Family

Portraiture is central to Wood's practice. Drawing from personal photographs, he creates stylised and emotionally resonant images of family members, friends, and fellow artists. These include works such as Portrait of a Woman (2014) and Young Architect (2009), in which the flat rendering of form is balanced by subtle emotional cues. He often paints Kusaka and their children, imbuing his works with intimacy and a diaristic quality. His portraits are not formal likenesses, but reconstructions of memory and visual experience, rendered in sharp lines and vivid colour.

Sports, Memory and Collecting

A lifelong sports enthusiast, Wood frequently incorporates references to basketball, baseball, and boxing into his art. His Boxing series and paintings such as Celtics Locker Room (2016) and Pete Rose No-Hit Game (2011) reflect a nostalgic fascination with American sports culture. These works draw on trading cards, vintage memorabilia, and televised broadcasts, reimagined through his painterly vocabulary. They underscore his fascination with collecting, a recurring motif in his wider practice that connects childhood memory with visual storytelling.

Exhibitions

Jonas Wood has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Jonas Wood, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London (2024)
• Jonas Wood: Plants and Animals, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022)
• Jonas Wood, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2019)
• Jonas Wood: Still Life With Two Owls (MOCA), Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles (2016)
• Hammer Projects: Jonas Wood, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010)

Group Exhibitions

• Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (2024)
• Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog), The Broad, Los Angeles (2023)
• The Interior Life: Recent Acquisitions, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C (2023)
• Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023)
• One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018)
• The Trick Brain, Aishti Foundation, Beirut (2018)

Critical Reception

Jonas Wood's art has been widely discussed in leading publications, including Artnet News, The Financial Times,

FAQs

Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2025