Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood (born 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles.

Early life and education Raised in Boston, Wood is the child of "art-inclined parents". Wood grew up surrounded by his grandfather's art collection which featured works from Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol. He graduated from the Cambridge School of Weston in 1995.

As an undergraduate, Wood chose to study at Hobart College, a liberal arts school where he could study both science and art. Wood's focus was on psychology during the majority of his time studying at Hobart and William Smith College. By his junior year, he had completed his psychology major and he spent his senior year studying painting. He now holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1999 and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from University of Washington in 2002.

Shortly after graduating, Wood moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a studio assistant for two years for painter Laura Owens and then another two years for sculptor Matt Johnson. He and Kusaka also worked for artist Charles Ray. While working as an assistant, Wood continued to make his own work.

Process During his student years, he explored making collage-like works based on montaged photographs that he took of himself, his friends, and their surroundings. Wood now paints from studies (collages and drawings) and sometimes uses photography, but most of his works and studies are part of the larger plan of creating paintings. Wood has also done etchings.

Wood's studio is filled with the objects that influence his work, such as his children's drawings, plants, vessels, and sport memorabilia. An example of this includes a giant basketball sculpture by Paa Joe. He also works close to his partner, Shio Kusaka, whose work he appropriates and collaborates with. Wood's influences are also auditory, as he tends to listen to basketball podcasts while he works.

A New York Times article by Janelle Zara states, "the studio is where Wood culls various photographs from the internet or his own archive and uses them as source material for his paintings". The appropriated imagery is organized in labeled folders in his studio to be physically accessible during his painting process. The images are printed out and pinned onto walls, then flattened and distilled into blocks of color. Wood then layers these "dense graphic patterns, overlapping fields of stipples and stripes, circles, squares, dots and wood grains". The result is the perception that his work is very sincere.

Style Wood's style is described as multidimensional. In T, he was described as working "With one foot in Modernist cool and the other in vibrant Pop Art". Roberta Smith of The New York Times notes that "his works negotiate an uneasy truce among the abstract, the representational, the photographic and the just plain weird."

Smith compares his work to those of Daniel Heidkamp. In another story about Wood, Smith noted that as a painter who paints his own life, his art bears similarity to Édouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, Alex Katz and David Hockney.

In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for Wood's work when Japanese Garden 3 sold for a $4.9 million.

Personal life Wood currently shares a studio with artist Shio Kusaka, his wife since 2002. Shio Kusaka, born in Japan, creates distinctive porcelain, and Wood then photographs and paints the pieces for co-operative exhibitions. The pair often work in tandem, motifs migrating from Kusaka's ceramic vessels to Wood's paintings and back again. He and Kusaka also incorporate imagery from their expansive art collection—including works by Alighiero Boetti, Michael Frimkess and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Mark Grotjahn, and Ed Ruscha—as well as from their children's storybooks and drawings.

In 2015 Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong presented Blackwelder, which brought together Wood's and Kusaka's works in a dedicated two-person exhibition. This was followed by the couple's first collaborative museum exhibition, at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands, in 2017.