Jonathan Lasker valuation
New York abstract painter who sets scribbles, grids and slabs of impasto against each other like a jazz trio.
Jonathan Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1948, and played bass guitar and blues harmonica in bands in the United States and Europe before turning to art.
What a work by Jonathan Lasker is worth
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Bio
Jonathan Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1948, and played bass guitar and blues harmonica in bands in the United States and Europe before turning to art. He took night classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1975, making collages and paintings in the spirit of Rauschenberg, and moved to the California Institute of the Arts in 1977. Since the late 1970s he has built his paintings from a small, consistent vocabulary: a patterned or grid-like ground, looping scribbled lines and figures of thick impasto, each painted in a different manner and set against the others, so that a picture reads as a set of separate things in conversation. He has compared the three elements of figure, ground and line to a jazz trio. The compositions look spontaneous but are planned, usually from small studies that he enlarges precisely, and he is counted among the painters who brought abstract painting back after Minimalism and Conceptual art.
The paintings, in oil on linen or canvas, depend on their thick, raised passages of paint, which can crack, flatten or pick up dirt, so condition should be looked at closely. The small studies that precede the paintings also come up. A work's date and title and its provenance through Greene Naftali, Thaddaeus Ropac or his earlier galleries are the reference points.
Jersey City, CalArts and the figure and ground
A retrospective travelled to the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Kunstverein St. Gallen in 1997 and 1998, and a larger one was held at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 2003.
Paintings 2001 to 2014 was shown at the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Étienne in 2015, and Paintings from Five Decades at the Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest in 2024.
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