Jonathan Lasker

Overview

I often think of my paintings as a form of image kit or perhaps as jigsaw puzzles, which offer components of paintings as clues pointing the viewer, not to a finished narrative (as when the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle completes the picture of Notre Dame), but rather to a self-awareness of how one construes a painting.

Through strong compositional structure and intelligent color choices, Lasker's paintings hum with energy. The artist explores the gap between marks and signs; a mark refers primarily to itself, while a sign signals a referent external to the painting, something known and recognizable. Though Lasker invented his own visual vocabulary, creating meaning through context and repetition, any obvious message remains elusive.

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Biography

Jonathan Lasker in his New York studio in 2007

I was very interested in making repetition a virtue as opposed to a vice. But I’m also very interested in things that are repeated in different subtle and unsubtle ways.

Jonathan Lasker (b. 1948) was born in Jersey City, NJ. He attended the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1975 and studied at the California Institute of the Arts in 1977. Adopting a playful approach to abstract paintings always in search for new territories, Lasker's paintings portray a visual vocabulary composed of scribbles, inspired by graffiti and cartoon imagery, whilst investigating the various qualities of painting itself. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, California, Fundacio La Caixa, Barcelona, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, among others.

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Works