Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Lasker, born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1948, made use of the art world’s conceptual turn in the 1980s, engaging in new possibilities of painting, and so developing the abstract formal idiom that has come to characterize his oeuvre. Resisting the Lyrical Abstraction, Field Painting, Minimalist movements of the 1970s, Lasker found himself confronted with the challenge of pictorial invention. As an answer to this quest, he devised a self-referential system using a vocabulary of sign-like shapes and colors, which the artist continues to draw upon, repeat, and reformulate in his work. The formal language of his paintings is abstract, while the visual means range from simple line drawings to thick paste-like applications of paint. His work challenges traditional perspectives on the relationship between fore- and background; between figure, backdrop, and line. While Lasker originally worked with large-scale formats, he began to explore smaller compositions in the late 1980s. The small maquettes allow for precise attention to detail, which he subsequently reproduces in his large-scale paintings. This process thus turns the organic, subjective and gestural pictorial idiom of his earlier works into an increasingly intellectual process.