Jonathan Lasker: From Drawings and White Form Paintings

Early paintings and drawings by Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Lasker's work is often described as bizarre and yet it is one of the most influential in contemporary abstract art. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period in which everything was in flux, when Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and colour field painting lost their formal commitment, he succeeded in realising themes such as referentiality, figuration, undisguised materiality and corporeality, even moments of the decorative and pictorial. The solid paintings and objects of the 1960s had become formally obsolete, and there was a return to art historical sources that provoked new artistic content in the form of New Image Painting, patterns and decorations. In short, abstraction, as applied by Jonathan Lasker, had arrived in the postmodern era. This volume presents a series of beautiful preliminary studies on paper as well as large-format oil paintings from 1977 to 1981 showing their radical artistic realisation.