Jonas Wood, Wood Grain Pot with Night Bloom (detail)
“From today, painting is dead,” the academic painter Paul Delaroche is purported to have said after seeing a daguerreotype for the first time. But it just won’t die and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) are bringing it to Texas.
The DMA will present the first major solo museum exhibition of work by American painter Jonas Wood. Bringing together approximately 35 works across 13 years of Wood’s career, the exhibition Jonas Wood traces the artist’s fascination with psychology, memory, and the self to shed light on a practice that is both “deeply personal and universal,” an objective every new painter strives for and few accomplish.
Jonas Wood will be on view at the DMA from March 24, 2019 through July 14, 2019. Known for his colorful and compressed depictions of the people, places, and things that populate his daily life, Los Angeles-based painter Jonas Wood (b. 1977, Boston) creates works that have clear traces of his biography in both form and content. Wood’s grandfather was an amateur painter whose personal collection of art included works by notable modernists such as Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. These artists, in addition to other modern masters ranging from Henri Matisse to David Hockney, have inspired Wood’s signature use of playful geometries, bold colors, and a distinct graphic style. Wood’s family members are recurrent characters in his paintings, as are the ceramics produced by his wife, artist Shio Kusaka, stressing the importance of familial dynamics in shaping identity, a notion central to his approach.
“Jonas Wood makes us reconsider the everyday. At once autobiographical and widely relevant, representational and abstract, his innovative approach to form provides a wealth of meaning that resonates with contemporary audiences who have been primed by digital culture,” said Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, The Nancy and Tim Hanley Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA.
Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Leather Clog
Perhaps the most famous and popular painter of everyday life is Van Gogh. Also opening in March, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) will present Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art. The exhibition explores the artist through rarely loaned paintings and drawings from throughout the decade of his career.
Go see some paintings!
