Jonas Wood

Anton Kern Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they are more saturated in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Jonas Wood represents the rise and revitalization of traditional figuration in contemporary painting. Concordant with David Hockney’s practice, Wood focuses on the world immediately around him, predominantly using close friends and family as subjects for portraiture in which the he combines figurative realism with modernist abstraction. Wood has a well-documented admiration for painters of the modern era, citing Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Calder, Monet, Vuillard, Bonnard, van Gogh and Stuart Davis amongst his inspirations. By integrating these influences with the remembered and documented encounters of his immediate surroundings, Wood creates an aesthetic dualism whereby the visual charm of modern painting is realised within a contemporary social setting.
In the present work, Wood depicts an image of his father situated in a conventional, albeit, distorted environment, in which the figure appears flat and fragmented allowing it to float in a three dimensional space. Wood typically takes multiple photographs of his subject from different perspectives in preparation for painting, altering and reforming them to create amalgamated scenes in collage which benefit from a diverse range of source material. Wood uses this technique to graft distinct moments from his personal history together and form a compositional peculiarity which has come to characterise his oeuvre.
Despite a facet of the autobiographical, Wood’s work avoids a personal nostalgia whilst retaining continuity between his paintings. From the present work, the central character, Jeremy, appears elsewhere in Wood’s oeuvre, the green parrot mirrors Wood's eponymous leaf motifs and the pattern on the jumper is constitutive of a broader exploration of graphic charm. These similarities allow space for subjective narrative to form, or indeed, as Wood puts it – “new memories” which exist both from the perspective of the viewer and artist. (Jonas Wood quoted in: Rebecca Bates, ‘Jonas Wood at Anton Kern Gallery’, Architectural Digest, September 12, 2013, online resource).
These similarities bring with them a sentimentality which transcends self-reflexion; taken as a whole, Woods work resonates as a reflection of contemporary society in general, a continuum in which the peculiar emerges from the everyday.