Jonas Wood

Overview

Jonas Wood was born in 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived and worked in Los Angeles since completing graduate study in painting at the University of Washington. He grew up among his grandfather's art collection, which held work by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol, and he read psychology as an undergraduate before turning to painting in his final year. That double training shows in the work. His subjects are almost always rooms he has occupied, objects he owns and people he knows, painted less as observation than as reconstructed memory.

Wood builds his pictures from photographs, his own and appropriated, which he cuts into collages or copies into drawings before enlarging them onto canvas. The intermediate step flattens everything. Interiors, landscapes, still lifes and sports scenes all resolve into overlapping fields of stipples, stripes, dots and wood grain, with scale and vantage point deliberately confounded. Critics have placed him with one foot in modernist cool and the other in pop, and have compared his domestic subjects to Vuillard, Matisse, Alex Katz and David Hockney.

Career

Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles was the first gallery to represent him and gave him a solo exhibition in 2006. The painter Mark Grotjahn saw that show and brought it to the attention of Anton Kern Gallery in New York, which mounted a one man exhibition in 2007, and a Chicago solo show followed two months later. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles gave him a project in 2010, and Lever House in New York followed in 2014. In 2017 Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar presented him with the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, his wife and studio partner, whose vessels migrate into his paintings and back again. His first major solo museum survey opened at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019, gathering works from across thirteen years of the practice.

His paintings are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others.

The market and the LLB lot

Wood's canvases trade in a very different register from his editions, and the gap between the two is the single most useful thing for a buyer here to understand. At Phillips in New York a complete set of four lithographs with screenprint from 2014, signed with initials and numbered from an edition of fifty and published by Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles, made USD 81,900 in 2021. Unique paintings have reached many multiples of that at evening sales in New York.

The work LLB has offered sits at the opposite end of that range. Large Shelf Still Life is an offset lithograph printed in colours, published as a poster on the occasion of the Voorlinden exhibition, stamped with the artist's name, title and date on the reverse and issued in an edition of unknown size. Bonhams catalogued the same poster in a Prints and Multiples sale in London. It is an exhibition poster rather than a signed limited edition, which is why it belongs in the low hundreds of euros rather than the thousands.

What to check before buying

Because the Voorlinden poster was printed to the edges of the full sheet, its value is unusually sensitive to edge wear and to whether the sheet has been trimmed or pinned. Signed impressions exist and carry a clear premium over unsigned ones. Anyone comparing prices should establish first whether an impression is signed, then whether the full sheet is intact, before reading across from any published result. The same caution applies in reverse: a strong result for a signed lithograph or a unique canvas says very little about what an unsigned exhibition poster should make.