Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Jonathan Lasker" in English language version.
Solo Exhibitions - 1984 Annette Gmeiner, Kirchzarten, Germany; Tibor De Nagy, New York; 1986 Michael Werner, Cologne, Germany; Tibor De Nagy, New York
In Collins & Milazzo's shows my work was contextualized with artists such as Ross Bleckner, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, Robert Gober, and others, with whom I was in subsequent museum shows in the 1990s.
Solo Exhibitions - 1986 Michael Werner, Cologne, Germany
I am very interested in the things in a painting being things unto themselves, which I would call 'things of paint.' It is in this literalness that I feel my pictures have a dialogue with Minimalism. […] I was trying to beat Minimalism at its own game. What I was proposing is that the Minimal-ist concept of 'specific objects' could be re-applied to the objects in a picture.
I am very interested in the things in a painting being things unto themselves, which I would call 'things of paint.' It is in this literalness that I feel my pictures have a dialogue with Minimalism. […] I was trying to beat Minimalism at its own game. What I was proposing is that the Minimalist concept of 'specific objects' could be reapplied to the objects in a picture.
Selected Group Exhibitions, 1995, Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela, Transatlantica: The America Europa Non-Representiva, Jacob Karpio and Ruth Auerbach, Curators
The titles are really my one-line shot at being a poet.
Sometimes the titles are about picture-making such as 'Sensible Arrangement' or 'Hermeneutic Picture,' but mostly they are not directly about that. Mostly I think of the titles as being parallel to the spirit of the paintings. The paintings tend to be ambiguous, and the titles are often ambiguous.
over the years, as [the] subject of language [in my paintings] has been introduced and reintroduced by others, I am sure it has influenced my own thinking about the work, and I have approached my painting a bit more from a language point of view. The big issue was not originally, specifically language, but the idea that there would be conflict and argument within the picture.
While permanently altering the nature of curatorial practice in the US, Collins & Milazzo's role as catalyst in the late-'80s neo-Conceptual takeover of the East Village was no less decisive.
Jonathan Lasker is an American abstract painter best known for his works incorporating biomorphic shapes, geometric patterns, and gestural graffiti marks within a shared pictorial space. Lasker works within the traditions of artists such as Philip Guston and Robert Ryman, focusing his efforts on reimagining pictorial ideas within the material constraints of painting. "My goal is to bring the viewer to the threshold of narrativity without crossing over," the artist has explained, "to bring the viewer to the state of pure pictorially." Born in 1948 in Jersey City, NJ, Lasker attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York before studying at the California Institute of Arts, where he received his MFA. Lasker's works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, the Musée National d'Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the High Art Museum in Atlanta, among others. In addition to his studio practice, Lasker has written extensively on abstraction and painting, notably including a collection of essays, Complete Essays 1984 – 1998, published in 1998. He lives and works in New York, NY.
Lasker, Jonathan - New York, NY $15,000
Lasker, Jonathan - New York, NY $5,000
TITLES Untitled (Proper), ARTIST Jonathan Lasker, United States, born 1948, MEDIUM oil on paper, CREDIT LINE AFI.17.2004, OBJECT NAME painting, CLASSIFICATION Paintings
Lasker explores the inflections, the innuendoes of hues and geometric forms that represent themselves rather than convey meaning for representing something else. These are works that simply ask us to see. By reducing (or, perhaps, ennobling) a form to its basics – a gray rectangle, perhaps, that glows on a graph grid – then placing beside it a similar but altered shape whose bold colors give it recrudescent life, Lasker wants us to look at what we ignore, or to imagine what we suppress. These are joyous, reasoned, passionate works. They trace moods through something indecipherable – they are, after all, abstractions – but Lasker has a way of anchoring us to them. Sight made tactile, thought made figurative.
The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities. The similarities are select-ed from the work; they aren't a movement's first principles or delimiting rules. Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined, not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative.
It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas.
The elements inside the rectangle are broad and simple and correspond closely to the rectan-gle. The shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectan-gular plane. The parts are few and so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in an ordi-nary sense. A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references.
Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.
Jonathan Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1948 and currently lives and works in New York City. He studied at the SVA, New York (1975-77) and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1977)
Jonathan Lasker (77)
Jonathan Lasker is generally considered to be one of the most important artists to emerge from the 1980s. His work has been critical to the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades.
Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things by Richard Milazzo is the first book to analyze the role of the sketch in the artist's work. Preliminary even to the small studies, the sketches are the stage in which Jonathan Lasker works out his initial ideas for a painting. Even before making the study or studies that precede the painting, the artist sketches out the most rudimentary of forms and colors, often making the most radical of changes in the process of arriving at the image that will become the final painting.
1989 Painting - Jonathan Lasker
An uneven array of painters will be on view, among them John Currin, Carroll Dunham, Jonathan Lasker, Nicola Tyson, Lari Pittman, Lily van der Stokker, Elliott Puckett, Thomas Scheibitz, Diana Cooper, Pet Sourin-thone, Paul Laffoly, John Wesley, David Reed, Frank Stella, and finally the exuberantly Hartley-esque David Bates, about whom Gary Indiana wrote one of the funniest, cruelest, and most unforgettable lines of art criticism, in his Voice review of the 1987 Whitney Biennial: "David Bates? Who the fuck is David Bates?
In the late '80s and early '90s, a group of New York painters set to work finding out. They revered the grid as much as Mondrian did -- even as they toyed with it like Silly Putty: Among them count Peter Halley, who broke the grid into blocks he called cells and conduits; and Jonathan Lasker, who sullied all the geometric cleanliness. And then there was Stephen Ellis. He agitated the grid.
