Jonas Wood

"You have to build the print piece by piece. I just love the way it looks, the process, the whole feel of it. It’s irreplaceable."

—Jonas Wood

Gagosian is pleased to present Prints 2, an exhibition of over thirty prints made by Jonas Wood between 2018 and 2022. It is conceived as a companion show to Prints, the first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s printmaking, presented by the gallery in 2018.

The works on view in Prints 2 feature Wood’s perennial motifs—plants, pottery, portraiture, interiors, landscapes, and basketball—reflecting the life of the artist through representations of home, studio, and natural spaces. They are united by Wood’s transformation of subject matter into images with skewed planar space, dense patterning, and vivid color. Developing his prints in parallel with his paintings, Wood has arrived at linked practices that continually inform one another.

Emphasizing the collaborative aspect of printmaking, Wood works with masters of traditional methods who have made innovative contributions to the field. Prints 2 features works made with Aliso Editions, Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions Ltd., Counter Editions, Hamilton Press, Mixografía, and Pace Editions. In addition, Wood publishes and co-publishes under his own imprint, WKS Editions.

The stylistic diversity of Wood’s prints results from his experimentation with pictorial effects, processes, and materials, effectively exploring the genre of printmaking itself. The methods used to produce the works in Prints 2 include hard-ground and soft-ground etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcut, as well as various hybrid processes. Wood pairs these techniques with variations in mark making, color, texture, and density to harness and reveal the characteristics unique to the medium.

Four Landscapes (2020), a suite of woodcuts made with a Japanese ukiyo-e technique, depicts scenes that invoke winter, spring, summer, and fall. Between twelve and twenty hand-carved blocks were used to produce each work’s vibrant colors and interlocked forms, giving these prints an uncanny resemblance to Wood’s use of gouache in his drawings. An edition of large-scale prints, 4 Seasons (2022), portrays four pairs of basketballs, revisiting a body of work from 2010 and representing the seasons of the year-round sport. Wood’s investigations into the compositional possibilities of printmaking culminate with Kitchen Interior (2022), a 112-color screen print made over twenty months that combines views of the landscape with a detailed interior enlivened by plants and aspects of domestic life.

Prints 2 is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that includes a conversation between the artist and master printer Ed Hamilton.

Jonas Wood was born in 1977 in Boston, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include Hammer Projects: Jonas Wood, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Clippings, Lever House Art Collection, New York (2013–14); and Shio Kusaka & Jonas Wood, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2017–18). A mid-career survey of Wood’s work was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019. Public commissions include Shelf Still Life, High Line Art, New York (2014); LAX Art Façade, Los Angeles (2014); and Still Life with Two Owls (MOCA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016–18).