Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood creates boldly coloured paintings, drawings and prints rendered in a crisp and sharp style. His images tend to portray objects, interiors and individuals derived from his personal life. Working through different genres, Wood’s art creates an intimate version of the contemporary world, redefined through his emotions and experiences.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1977, Wood was raised in an artistically inclined family. He grew up around his grandfather’s extensive art collection, which included works by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder and Andy Warhol. In 1999 he obtained a degree in psychology, after which he undertook a Master of Fine Arts at University of Washington, graduating in 2002. Determined to succeed in the art world, he moved to Los Angeles to work as studio assistant while perfecting his own creative approach. 

His early experiments were based on collage techniques. He produced montaged photographs he took of himself, his friends and the world around them. In his more mature works, he developed a warmer, more intimate aesthetic which isolates and breaks down images into layers of shapes, patterns and colours. The resulting artworks, produced at every scale, suggest a sense of physical and emotional depth despite the flatness of each compositional element.

Photography remains an integral part of Wood’s process. He stated: ‘[A] bunch of times, I’ll make a drawing from a found photo, a photo collage, or photo I took, and then make a painting from that drawing.’

Wood’s captivating still lifes, portraits and landscapes are distilled renditions of his studio, which he filled with objects most important to his life, including his children’s drawings, plants, vases and sport memorabilia. This personal archive of appropriated images is organised in folders, printed out and pinned to the walls of his studio. From here, forms are fragmented and reassembled, layered with graphic patterns and overlapped with flat shapes. Another fertile source of inspiration is Wood’s partner, sculptor Shio Kusaka, whose work is echoed in his paintings of her ceramic vessels. 

Wood has defined his work as ‘a visual diary or even a personal history’. He stated ‘I’m not going to paint something that doesn’t have anything to do with me. Of all of the possible things I could paint, the thing that interests me is something that I can get close enough to in order to paint it honestly.’

Wood had his first solo exhibition in 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. ‘Blackwelder’, held in 2015 in Hong Kong, brought together Wood’s and Kusaka’s works in a dedicated two-person exhibition. The couple created their first collaborative exhibition in 2017, at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands. In 2019 the Dallas Museum of Art presented Wood’s first major survey show, exhibiting 33 works selected across his career.

Today, Wood’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His art is admired by critics, gallerists and buyers for its ability to interrogate the boundaries between the foreign and the familiar, incorporating everyday objects and materials.