Curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck
In the clean sunlight beaming over every curling vine, fanning leaf, and flowerpot in the paintings and drawings of Jonas Wood, you can feel Southern California. For his first solo US museum exhibition in nearly a decade, featuring more than thirty works created between 2006 and the present, Wood brushes LA’s cool color into strange planes and stony angles. He pulls from the hard-edge spatial manipulations of Stuart Davis, the lush homes depicted by Sylvia Sleigh, and the late cutouts of Matisse, channeling an optimistic and elemental energy into compressed and complex compositions. Meanwhile, the artist’s family, friends, old heroes, and warm colleagues emerge from the flat light, a community softly shaping a life’s work. The accompanying catalogue includes essays by Ken Allan and Brodbeck and an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
