'Jonathan Lasker: Paintings and Studies for Paintings' March 22–April 20, 2019

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present a major exhibition of paintings and studies by Jonathan Lasker.

Lasker's canvases involve an exchange between expressionist forms and flat grounds, dealing with the tension between deep space and the concrete reality of gestures. Starting with small studies, Lasker enlarges his motifs freehand, so that small marker gestures, for example, become flatter graffiti-like passages and more expressionist marks swell and coalesce into impasto reliefs. By replicating gestures verbatim, the authenticity of the original signs is questioned and put into play, resulting with a simulation of expression. His color sensibility seems almost Pop––he often uses a palette of almost artificial mint greens, baby blues and caustic pinks. This synthetic painting, neither completely figurative nor absolutely abstract, generates a new meta vocabulary for the twenty-first century.

Lasker has had over seventy one-person exhibits since 1981 and participated in over three hundred group exhibits worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, PS1, New York; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Rooseum in Malmo, Sweden; Venice Biennale, and Documenta IX, Kassel, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany. He has had retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Bielefield, Germany; the Stedelijk, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland; the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.

Lasker's works are in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn, Washington DC; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo, Japan; Mudam, Luxembourg; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

This is his first major viewing in Philadelphia since his ICA exhibit in 1992. He previously was showcased in Sid Sachs' exhibits Pop Abstraction (1998) at the PAFA and Transcendent & Unrepentant (2002) at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.