On the early painting and drawing of Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Laskers work is often considered bizarre, yet it is one of the most influential in ­contemporary abstract art. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when everything was in flux, when Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting were no longer formally binding, Lasker succeeded in realizing themes such as referentiality, figuration, genuine material­ity and corporeality, even aspects of the decora­t­ive and pictorial. The tastefully ­executed paintings and carefully crafted objects of the 1960s had reached the end of their days in terms of form; there was a recourse to styles and materials that not only served artists as art historical sources but, as New Image Painting, patterns, and decorations, resulted in new artistic content. In short, abstraction as understood and applied by Lasker had reached the postmodern age. This volume shows a series of beautiful preliminary studies of this process on paper, as well as large-format oil paintings from 1977 to 1981 that demonstrate their radical pictorial implementation.