Jonas Wood
“Four Tennis Courts”
New York, 980 Madison Avenue
Describing his work as a visual diary or “even a personal history,” Wood charges images of people, places, and objects from his everyday life with art historical references. Inspired by the bold formal distillations of such artists as David Hockney, he emphasizes pattern, shape, and ornamentation while confounding scale and perspective. His lush, exuberant interiors and still lifes depict plants potted in vessels made by his wife, Shio Kusaka, and by artists in the couple’s personal collection including Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Michael Frimkess, and Akio Takamori.
Wood Kusaka Studios, Los Angeles, 2021. Artwork © Jonas Wood. Photo: Marten Elder
Wood first made use of sports imagery in dynamic post-Pop portraits derived from boxing, baseball, and basketball cards—tokens that have as much to do with celebrity as nostalgia. He later became interested in depicting the physical spaces associated with sports. While watching games on television, Wood developed a shorthand approach to representing courts and fields, paring complex scenes down to geometric shapes and flat, saturated colors. In the oil and acrylic canvases on view, he reworks four of his favorite drawings from a suite of twenty-four produced between 2016 and 2018, all of which depict famous international tennis tournaments.
“My forms are not rendered spatially. My paintings of tennis courts are about an interest in abstraction, and how the court becomes a geometric puzzle.”
Using televised events as reference, Wood foregrounds the strikingly abstract nature of tennis court design; he renders each site large scale and in portrait format, preserving its key characteristics while drastically simplifying, or eliminating altogether, the players and spectators. The courts—in Abu Dhabi, London, Melbourne, and Paris—are distinguished by their iconic colors and identifying signage.
