Jonathan Lasker (b. 1948, Jersey City, New Jersey) attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, as well as California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Jonathan Lasker’s works explore and dissect the language of abstract picture making. The surfaces of his works often combine thick lines and thin. He covers light, colorful squiggles and repetitive patterns with dense black grids, or creates “absences” by erasing or obliterating earlier lines. At first glance, Lasker’s compositions can seem haphazard and doodle-like, but closer inspection reveals a carefully planned balance and self-control. “I often think of my paintings as a form of image kit or perhaps as jigsaw puzzles, which offer components of painting as clues pointing the viewer, not to a finished narrative…but rather to a self-awareness of how one construes a painting,” he says. His process consists of a collision between intuition and analysis – he makes multiple freely sketched drawings before executing his final composition, which is contrastingly rendered almost mechanically and methodically, as it is consequently enlarged and copied as the final painting.
His work can be found in many collections, including Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), and Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), among others. Lasker lives and works in New York City.
Jonathan Lasker’s work was featured in the RxART Coloring Book: Between the Lines Vol. 3. In 2007, RxART completed projects at St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals, where lithographs by Jonathan were installed in the inpatient Psychiatric Unit.