Jonathan Lasker

By greatly enlarging small sketches, Jonathan Lasker’s oil paintings use a kind of edited doodling to extend the language of abstraction into new territories. Lasker’s work focuses on the translation of ideas into painted gestures and the relationship between paintings and the subjective experience of their viewers. His paintings, such as Reason and Free Will (2007), often incorporate marks or forms that can be read simultaneously as representative and as purely abstract, enabling a kind of speculative contemplation of form, content, and description. Since the early 1980s, Lasker has had several solo shows and has been included in group exhibitions at some of New York’s toniest galleries, as well as galleries and museums around the world.