Since the late 1970s, Jonathan Lasker has developed a distinctive formal vocabulary based on different mark-making processes, including structural grids, graphic scribbled lines and thick impasto strokes of paint. Although he creates these forms intuitively, the compositions themselves are highly structured and controlled. At the forefront of artists who re-established the possibilities of painting after Minimalism and Conceptualism emptied the picture-plane, he has mounted a challenge to the medium's status quo, creating a unique system of painting based on a figure-ground relationship, in which the figure and ground stand in a dialectical relationship to one another.
The artist uses doubled, transposed and translated forms to create paintings composed of distinct, clearly defined elements. 'In Lasker's work, forms […] are part of a larger schema, but independent in terms of form, colour, texture, and manner of paint application,' describes art critic Richard Kalina NA. 'Each image [in the picture] becomes a thing itself, an element to be examined, experienced and categorised; a component of the larger grammatical structure that Lasker has built.' The pictures which form are arrived at by the viewer interpretively rather than literally, through an active engagement with the different abstract figures on the canvas and the relationships between them. Viewers are encouraged to experience themselves through the act of viewing and, in the end, they become the subject of Lasker's paintings.
Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as well as the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. He lives and works in New York City. He has lectured extensively in the US and Europe, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 and 1989.
