26 Facts About Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Lasker was born on 1948 and is an American abstract painter based in New York City whose work has played an integral role in the development of Postmodern Painting.

Jonathan Lasker is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York and by Thaddaeus Ropac.

Jonathan Lasker's work has been covered in Artforum, Artscribe, Arts Magazine, Flash Art, New Art Examiner, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Tema Celeste, Village Voice, Bomb Magazine, and The Washington Post among others.

Jonathan Lasker was the subject of the 2005 book Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things by Richard Milazzo which documented his process of developing abstract compositions from sketches to paintings.

Jonathan Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as well as the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

Originally aspiring to become a musician, Jonathan Lasker left New York after studying at Queens College and played bass guitar and blues harmonica in bands in the US and Europe.

Jonathan Lasker continued studying at SVA until 1977, when he transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

Jonathan Lasker spent the spring and fall semesters of 1977 at CalArts.

Jonathan Lasker discussed this period in an interview with Amy Bernstein:.

The ideas that Jonathan Lasker adopted at this early stage in his career brought an analytical approach to the supposedly outmoded practice of making a painting by hand.

Jonathan Lasker's solution was to create a recurring vocabulary of motifs of texture, shape, color, and line that he would arrange and rearrange from painting to painting, as if they were a cast of characters entering and exiting a stage.

In "Image Kit", an essay Jonathan Lasker wrote in 1986 and later revised for a book of his complete essays published in 1998, he describes the distancing and self-consciousness on the part of both the artist and viewer that is fundamental to his work:.

In October 1977, two months before he left CalArts, Jonathan Lasker painted "Illinois", which he considers his breakthrough work.

Jonathan Lasker spent time studying the thickly textured Abstract Expressionist canvases of Clyfford Still in the museum's permanent collection, as well the painting House of Cards by Al Held, which is filled with brightly colored and broadly outlined geometric shapes.

One of the people who saw that show was the art dealer Tony Shafrazi, who invited Jonathan Lasker to participate in his own gallery's debut group exhibition on Mercer Street in Soho.

Also in 1981, Jonathan Lasker had his first exhibition in Europe, at Galerie Gunnar Kaldewey, in Dusseldorf, Germany, where his work was noticed by the art dealer David Nolan, who was then working with Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne.

Jonathan Lasker had a solo show at Tibor de Nagy that year and again in 1986.

Jonathan Lasker begins by drawing on small pads of paper, choosing several sketches for further development.

Jonathan Lasker then makes small versions of the selected images in oil paint on paper, putting those compositions through several variations.

Jonathan Lasker has written a number of essays on art, artists, and other topics.

Jonathan Lasker sees the titling of his paintings as a form of writing.

Jonathan Lasker seems to paint out of suave disgust for the pseudo-radical philistines' antipathy toward painting.

The critic Barry Schwabsky, in his reading of Jonathan Lasker's work, adds another layer of complexity, that of an ambiguous relationship to metaphor within Jonathan Lasker's central focus on paint-as-paint.

Jonathan Lasker once told me he thought the Minimalists had been trying to make an art without metaphor, and in fact had succeeded; but the point having been proved, he continued, there's no longer an urgent motivation to produce more metaphor-free work.

Jonathan Lasker explores the inflections, the innuendoes of hues and geometric forms that represent themselves rather than convey meaning for representing something else.

Jonathan Lasker's work is included in numerous private and public collections around the world.