Jonathan Lasker From Drawings and White Form Paintings

On the early painting and drawing of Jonathan Lasker – Jonathan Lasker’s work is readily described as quirky, and yet it is one of the most influential bodies of work 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 were forfeiting their formal authority, he succeeded in realising themes such as referentiality, figuration, undisguised materiality and corporeality, and even moments of the decorative and the pictorial. The solid paintings and objects of the 1960s had formally had their day; there was a recourse to art-historical sources which, in the shape of New Image Painting, patterns and decoration, provoked new artistic content. In short, abstraction as Jonathan Lasker applied it had arrived in postmodernism. The volume shows a series of beautiful preliminary studies on paper as well as their radical pictorial realisation in large-format oil paintings from 1977 to 1981.