Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood’s highly stylized paintings are fusions of landscape, portraiture and still life. He meticulously renders domestic scenes in flat color and graphic line, incorporating art historical references alongside people and places from his personal life. He is particularly known for depicting finely detailed plants, stacked bookshelves and ‘picture within a picture’ elements like TVs and posters. In preparation for each painting, the artist first arranges the composition by collaging studies, drawings and photographs, creating a complex and layered effect that his ultimate images retain. 

Born in Boston in 1977, Wood grew up surrounded by the expansive art collection of his grandfather, which included pieces by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell and Andy Warhol. Wood received a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. He then settled in Los Angeles, where he still lives and works. His practice draws on David Hockney’s sunny California scenes, Henri Matisse’s colorful still lifes and Alex Katz’s simplistic portraits. Wood has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and he has completed public commissions for the High Line in New York, LAXART and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

-       Night Bloom Still Life, 2015, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 90 x 80 inches (228.6 x 203.2 cm), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and representative of the artist’s depictions of plants

-       Landscape Pot with Yellow Orchid, 2014, oil and acrylic on canvas, 3 × 2.3 m