Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood deploys bold and block colours to invoke elements of art history with the images, objects and people that surround him. He challenges expectations of scale and vantage point, by translating the three-dimensional world into flat spaces to offer an authentic view of the contemporary world.

Raised in Boston, US, Wood grew up surrounded by his grandfather’s art collection and subsequently went to Hobart College, a liberal arts school, where he studied both science and art. He later obtained a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Washington and shortly after graduating, moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an artist.

Wood’s works reference a multitude of different genres, from domestic interiors, to landscapes and still life, with a central motif on plants, flowers and pots. His processes involve collage based studies in which he works with photographs, that he manipulates by reassembling them in order to give a modified spatial view that is typical of Wood’s painterly language. Landscape Pot with Yellow Orchid (2014), shows an evening landscape within a plant vase, blending the boundaries between exterior and interior space through distorted perspective.

Wood recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Dallas Museum and 2021 a solo exhibition of his large-scale paintings of tennis courts at Gagosian gallery in New York. His work can be found in collections of the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and many others.