JONATHAN LASKER
‘Over the last thirty years Jonathan Lasker has produced a body of work that, while operating within the general framework of late modernist painting and drawing practice, has mounted a serious challenge to painting’s status quo. In doing so, he has, as much as anyone, maintained the vitality and validity of contemporary abstraction... In Lasker’s work, images... are part of a larger schema, but independent in terms of form, colour, texture, and manner of paint application. Each image becomes a thing itself, an element to be examined, experienced and categorised; a component of the larger grammatical structure that Lasker has built.’ -Richard Kalina, Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
Lasker has exhibited internationally since the early 1980s. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain in 2003, which travelled to K-20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Other notable solo exhibitions include; Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity - Paintings from the 1990s, which in 1999-2000 toured the Forum for Contemporary Art, St Louis, Missouri, USA; The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, USA; Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977-1997, toured the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland and Kunstverein St Gallen im Kunstmuseum, Switzerland in 1997–1998.
Lasker is represented in numerous public collections, including the Eli Broad Foundation, LA, USA; Hirschhorn Museum, Washington D.C., USA; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; MoMA, New York, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Spain.
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1948, he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and CalArts in Valencia, California in the late 1970s.
Text courtesy Timothy Taylor.
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