Jonas Wood (b. 1977, Boston) works across a variety of genres, including portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and interior scenes. His paintings and works on paper reflect an instantly recognizable vision of the contemporary world, as well as a personal approach to subject matter defined by his affinities and experiences. Its familiarity is matched by a quasi-abstract logic that breaks pictures down into layered compositions of geometry, pattern, and colour.

Wood works at every scale, and maintains active drawing and printmaking practices, generating techniques that he also uses in painting. Conjuring depth using flat forms – his process involves collage-based studies in which he works with photographs, breaking images apart and reassembling them – Wood probes the boundary between the new and the familiar, integrating emotionally resonant material from everyday life. Painting becomes a way to freshen the artist’s – and the viewer’s – perception of the world.

Wood has been the subject of solo and two-person institutional exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (2019); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (with Shio Kusaka, 2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010). Other solo projects include the mural Still Life with Two Owls, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016–2018); Shelf Still Life, High Line Art, New York (2014); and LAXART Billboard and Façade, Los Angeles (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (2024); Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog), The Broad, Los Angeles (2023); New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023); Psychic Wounds: On Art and Trauma, The Warehouse, Dallas (2020); One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Los Angeles – A Fiction, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2016, traveled to Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France, 2017).

His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wood lives and works in Los Angeles.