Jonathan Lasker Painting and Drawing

Thaddaeus Ropac presents a series of Jonathan Lasker’s rarely exhibited pencil and ink drawings. Created autonomously from his painting practice, these works on paper reflect Lasker’s characteristic visual vocabulary of geometric gestures and patterns in a delicate and immediate way.

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Presented alongside this group of drawings are four recent paintings, the very first works to come out of the artist’s newly established studio in Munich. A significant change from the energy and noise of New York City, this unfamiliar environment facilitated an experimental atmosphere for the artist and served as a unique source of inspiration for him at this time. The dialogue established between the two distinct series of paintings and drawings opens up a new perspective within this exhibition, highlighting the breadth of the American artist’s work.

Jonathan Lasker

An Internal Life with Moving Parts, 2023

Oil on canvas board
24 x 30 cm (9.45 x 11.81 in)

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Lasker’s unmistakable painterly language is based on a distinctive mark-making process, initially conceived during his studies at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, where prevailing conceptual tendencies declared painting dead. His focus lies on an intuitive approach to artmaking, evident in the works on view through the palpable sense of dynamism and playfulness that they achieve, despite resulting from a carefully controlled process. His motifs include hovering, cloud-like circular fields of scribbles, structural grids, and graphic lines juxtaposed with colourful, relief-like impasto forms created through the vigorous application of paint. Like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, these elements form the core of his conceptual framework.

Jonathan Lasker

Untitled, 2012

Graphite and colored pencil on paper
76 x 56 cm (29.92 x 22.05 in)

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For his paintings and also this new series of drawings, exhibited for the first time, Lasker’s creative process commences with sketches, intuitively capturing basic shapes as raw inspiration on paper. ‘I do a lot of sketching in my spiral-bound sketchbooks, and that is usually where the works start,’ he explains. These initial outlines, often realised freehand in a stream of consciousness, serve as the foundation for his thought-out compositions.

Jonathan Lasker

Untitled, 2012

Graphite, colored pencil and india ink on paper
76 x 56.5 cm (29.92 x 22.24 in)

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The making of a picture, to me, is not necessarily improvisational. The origins of what it’s going to be get imagined and improvised, but the act of making the paintings tends to be more strategic. They are preconceived and no mistakes are allowed.

— Jonathan Lasker

Evoking perceptions of surface and depth, Lasker’s works convey a sense of figurative presence despite the viewer’s inability to truly identify the pictorial content. At first sight, the backgrounds are surface bound, but on closer inspection the compositions feature indications of linear perspective, hinting at conceptions of space such as horizon lines.

Jonathan Lasker

Pure Possibility, 2023

Oil on canvas
76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40 in)

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‘Even though my works are abstract, I still consider them to be pictures, and they inspire recognition,’ the artist explains. Rejecting the idea of a passive artwork-viewer relationship, the often colourful, diagrammatic compositions oscillate between intuition and analysis, encouraging viewers to connect the disparate elements that constitute the work to find their own associative sense of meaning and narrative. As Lasker explains, ‘I always think of the viewer as completing the picture.’

Jonathan Lasker

Cultivated Scene with Parallel Metaphors, 2023

Oil on canvas
76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40 in)

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To me, drawing is really graphite on paper because it’s conceptually what the image is about. It’s about the mark. The India ink is the only way to get that kind of really emphatic black line. So that’s what I was after with those bold lines. They’re intended to be softly referential and meant to engage the viewer’s imagination or subconscious with what that could be.

— Jonathan Lasker

 

Jonathan Lasker

Untitled, 2014
Graphite and india ink on paper
56 x 76 cm (22.05 x 29.92 in)

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Jonathan Lasker
Untitled, 2023
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
57.2 x 76.5 cm (22.52 x 30.12 in)

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Jonathan Lasker Untitled, 2023 Graphite and colored pencil on paper 57.2 x 76.5 cm (22.52 x 30.12 in)

Jonathan Lasker
Untitled, 2019
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
57 x 76 cm (22.44 x 29.92 in)

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Jonathan Lasker Untitled, 2019 Graphite and colored pencil on paper 57 x 76 cm (22.44 x 29.92 in)

The Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest, Romania, will be holding a solo exhibition of American artist Jonathan Lasker's work starting February 20, 2024.

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